![]() ![]() Then as chance would have it, a huge hurricane, Hurricane Florence, threatened the home where I lived, and I had to leave in the middle of the night after getting an ominous phone message from the government. I could not imagine an early language nor could I imagine an initial or early developing sense of time. In other words, language gave us the tools to work with time.īut the period in between our original animal existence and a fully developed language was a dark mystery. And this allowed planning, coordinating and sharing, i.e., all the things that made Homo sapiens so powerful and dominant on the planet. I also knew that after perhaps hundreds of thousands of years when we/they had emerged from their instinctual animal existence, they did develop modern languages with a full set of expressions, concepts, and metaphors to describe and work with time in a linear fashion, i.e., past, present, and future. I assumed that before that, like virtually all animals, Homo sapiens were locked into the present, into the here and now, and that they lived entirely in the moment. One of my own personal quests has been to go back as far as possible in history to find the moment when we Homo sapiens began to think about time in terms of past, present, and future and then, as a result, were able to make plans. His work has become the basis for our understanding of the material world and is considered a milestone in scientific thought. Mendeleev (left) and his notes about the periodic table. He did this for a number of years until one night he had a dream and saw the entire periodic table almost perfectly arranged. He had put each element and what he knew about it, such as its atomic weight, on a card and then laid out these cards as though he was playing a kind of solitaire. And this switch in perspective opened up an entirely new way of looking at things.įresh from my eBook research, I thought of Mendeleev who put together the first working chart of the elements that make up all matter, a chart that is now known as the periodic table. ![]() Rather than thinking of us as civilized people who occasionally succumbed to animal behavior, I began to think of us as basically animals who were doing their best to be civilized. I wanted a larger hypothesis that could tie many, if not most, of my ideas together.Īround this time I also had begun to entertain a new point of view about the human condition. I was confident that I had mapped out a pretty good set of ideas and yet at the same time, I felt there was something missing. I have been working on this subject for seven years. Then I started to think about my own ideas concerning the human experience of time - the purpose of this blog, DeconstructingTime. And after writing these eBooks I was musing about the many theories and discoveries that had become part of civilization today. It was the perfect assignment for me - because I like to look for the big overview, the big picture, while also finding substantial facts and historical events to back up my conclusions. Each 10,000 word eBook was long enough to go into some detail but short enough that I would not get bogged down in endless minutia. I had just finished writing several historical eBooks for a client at about the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Neolithic Revolution, Greek Mythology and Galileo. Then suddenly something triggers an insight and the various disconnected pieces of the puzzle now come together to form one coherent picture.Īfter seven years of writing this blog about the human experience of time, I had one of these moments while driving through drenching thunderstorms as I was fleeing a monster hurricane. Frustrated, a person gives up and focuses their mind elsewhere. It usually comes after an extended period of work in an effort to solve a difficult problem. It's something that every artist, writer, scientist, thinker hopes will happen sooner or later.
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