We have long been told that time is a thief, a silent prowler that robs us of our vitality and leaves us with the husks of our former selves. We track its progress in the mirror, in the softening of a jawline or the deepening of a crease.
But recent insights into the relationship between the mind and our biological “clocks” suggest a more haunting possibility: time isn’t just stealing from us; we are handing it over.
New research into epigenetic aging—the cellular measurement of how “old” our bodies truly are—reveals that those who harbor deep anxiety about aging actually age faster.
Specifically, the fear of declining health acts as a catalyst, accelerating the very decay we dread.
“Fears about declining health had the strongest link [to faster biological aging], while concerns about beauty or fertility didn’t appear to have the same biological impact.”
It seems the body is a faithful servant to the mind’s expectations.
If we view the later chapters of life as a slow-motion catastrophe, our cells begin to prepare for the wreckage. This creates a tragic feedback loop: we worry because we see signs of age, and our worry ensures those signs arrive with greater velocity.
In my own reflections, I’ve begun to think of aging not as a process of depletion, but as one of distillation. In our youth, we are a broad, shallow lake—vast, shimmering, and scattered. As we age, the borders close in, but the depth increases. The water becomes clearer, the essence more potent.
If we can shift our internal gaze away from what is being lost and toward what is being concentrated, perhaps we can quiet the ticking.
To age well is not to fight the clock, but to stop treating the passage of time as an indictment.
We are not just growing old; we are becoming more of who we were meant to be.
The architecture of autumn is not one of collapse, but of a different, more golden kind of light.
There is a fundamental mismatch between the hardware in our heads and the software of the modern world. We are linear creatures living in an exponential age. We can be stunned by exponential growth.
Our ancestors evolved in a world where inputs matched outputs. If you walked for a day, you covered a specific distance. If you walked for two days, you covered twice that distance. If you gathered firewood for an hour, you had a pile; for two hours, you had a bigger pile. Survival depended on the ability to predict the path of a spear or the changing of seasons—linear, predictable progressions.
But nature and technology often behave differently. They follow a curve that our intuition simply cannot map.
If a lily pad doubles in size every day and covers the entire pond on the 30th day, on which day does it cover half the pond? Our linear intuition wants to say the 15th day. But the answer, of course, is the 29th day.
For twenty-nine days, the pond looks mostly empty. The growth is happening, but it feels deceptively slow. We look at the water on day 20, or even day 25, and think, “Nothing is happening here. This is manageable.” We mistake the early flatness of an exponential curve for a lack of progress.
This is the “deception phase” of exponential growth. It is where dreams die because the results haven’t shown up yet. It is where we ignore a virus because the case numbers seem low. It is where we dismiss a new technology because the early versions are clumsy and comical.
Ernest Hemingway captured this feeling perfectly in The Sun Also Rises when a character is asked how he went bankrupt. His answer:
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
That is the essence of the exponential. The “gradually” is the long, flat lead-up where we feel safe. The “suddenly” is the vertical wall that appears overnight.
The tragedy is not that we fail to do the math—we can all multiply by two. The tragedy is that we fail to feel the math. We judge the future by looking in the rearview mirror, projecting a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow. But when the road curves upward toward the sky, looking backward is the fastest way to crash.
To navigate this world, we must learn to distrust our gut when it says “nothing is changing.” We have to look for the compounding mechanisms beneath the surface. We have to respect the 29th day.
As I wander through the topography of life, I find myself drawn to the notion that meaning is not a destination, but a traveling companion. The words of Neil King echo in my mind like a gentle breeze rustling the leaves of understanding: “You bring meaning with you when you go looking for meaning, and the more of it you bring, the more you get in return.” It is a reminder that the search for significance is not a passive pursuit, but an active participation in the creation of our own significance.
Like a cartographer charting the unexplored territories of the human experience, we bring our own instruments of meaning-making to the journey. Our experiences, beliefs, and values serve as our compass guiding us through the our personal paths of existence. The more we bring to the table, the more we are able to discern the hidden patterns and connections that weave the tapestry of our lives.
As I meander through the landscape of memory, I realize that the moments of greatest insight and understanding were not chance encounters, but the culmination of a deliberate search. The more I brought to the experience — curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to learn — the more the world revealed its secrets to me. The gentle rustle of leaves in an autumn breeze became a symphony of sound, a reminder of the beauty that lies just beneath the surface of the mundane.
In this sense, meaning is not something we find, but something we forge. It is the alchemy of our experiences, transformed by the crucible of our perception into a golden understanding that illuminates the path ahead. And yet, it is a fleeting thing, a will-o’-the-wisp that beckons us deeper into the mystery.
Perhaps that is the greatest truth of all — that meaning is not a destination, but a journey. It is the process of bringing our whole selves to the experience of life, with all its joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures. The more we bring, the more we receive, and the more we are transformed by the encounter.
As I continue on this winding path, I am reminded of the wisdom of the ancient Greek aphorism: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” But I would add a corollary — the unlived life is not worth examining. It is in the living, the experiencing, and the bringing of our whole selves to the moment that we find the meaning we seek.
As you embark on your own journey of discovery, remember to bring your instruments of meaning-making with you. Often it involves photography or journaling in the moment. The more you bring, the more you will receive, and the more the world will reveal its secrets to you. For in the end, it is not the destination that matters, but the journey itself — the journey of bringing meaning to the world, and finding it reflected back in all its beauty and complexity.
Note: Yesterday Meta released their latest open source AI models: Llama 3. This post based on the quotation from Neil King’s book was written with the help of Llama 3 and lightly edited by me.You can try out Llama 3 yourself at https://meta.ai
“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.” This poetic analogy from author Annie Dillard captures the profound divide between a partial and total solar eclipse. While both are extraordinary astronomical events, experiencing totality is utterly unparalleled.
A partial solar eclipse, where the moon passes between the Earth and sun but only obscures a portion of the sun’s disk, is certainly a marvel to behold. The sun’s brilliant light fades as the moon’s dark silhouette encroaches, creating eerie shadows and lighting effects. Birds may go quiet, temperatures can drop, and the world takes on an unusual hue as day seemstransitionally to turn into night. It’s undoubtedly a memorable phenomenon.
However, as Dillard articulates through her vivid comparisons, a partial eclipse merely hints at the profoundness awaiting in totality. It’s akin to an introductory gesture, whetting the appetite for something far more consequential lying ahead. Just as a first kiss is an enticing prelude to marriage’s covenantal intimacy, or an airplane flight can’t foreshadow the terrifying free-fall of jumping out mid-air, so too does a partial eclipse only skim the surface of its total counterpart’s depths.
During the fleeting minutes when the moon entirely blocks out the sun’s light along the narrow corridor of totality, the world undergoes a metamorphosis like no other. Dillard’s quote contrasts the total eclipse’s uniqueness by anchoring the familiar – kisses, airplanes – with their respective life-shaking counterparts of matrimony and plummeting from heights. By such comparisons, totality emerges as an almost otherworldly, paradigm-shifting event.
When totality strikes, day is obliterated in an instant, replaced by an ethereal twilight glow surrounding the revealed solar corona, the sun’s incandescent outer atmosphere. The tenuous corona, extending millions of miles into space yet normally obstructed by the sun’s blinding brightness, streams like a heavenly crown encircling the blackened lunar disk suspended in the heavens. Surrounding stars and planets materialize in the striking negative sky. Dillard, speaking from experience, has witnessed grown folks “turn and squall with oversuffered tendernesses” when confronted by totality’s dizzying effects.
This sense of being transported to another realm, of something extraordinary enfolding one’s existence, is what sets totality apart from its “kissing” cousin, the partial eclipse. The latter may be beautiful, but can never prepare the psyche for totality’s sensory overload and utter transformation of the familiar heavens. The two phenomena occupy entirely separate phenomenological universes.
Like a first kiss versus marriage, or routine flight versus existential free-fall, the total solar eclipse represents a singular, almost mythical boundary realm. Its awesome imposition of cosmic forces makes onlookers feel part of something greater transpiring around them. As Dillard conveys, totality disturbs our rational moorings, allowing a breathtaking glimpse beyond the veil of everyday reality into the sublime mysteries unfolding above.
Undoubtedly, even reading vivid descriptions or seeing stunning images and video cannot substitute for the visceral, perception-altering experience itself. But Dillard’s eloquent analogies provide profound entry points to begin comprehending totality’s grandeur. Only by metaphorically situating the total solar eclipse alongside those rarest of life events – marriage, plummeting through the void – can one conceptually grope towards its world-upending gravitas.
So while a partial eclipse may be deeply moving in its own right, it is but the opening act to totality’s astonishing main spectacle. The former merely scratches the surface of the holistic dissolution of boundaries and merging with the cosmos that totality offers. For those longing to encounter something truly elemental, to be shaken to one’s existential core by the cosmos’ rhythms writ large, a total solar eclipse stands in a category by itself. As Dillard reminds us, nothing can quite prepare us for that paradigmatic plunge.
Note: This post was written mostly by Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet. It began with me searching for the word “eclipse” in my Readwise highlights database. The first quotation found was the excellent one by Annie Dillard that’s cited in the first paragraph. I used this prompt with Claude:
You are an expert writer of blog posts that are simple, clear and to the point. Write a 750 word post musing on the following quotation: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.” (Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New)
Where I live we will only be experiencing about a 35% of totality solar eclipse later this morning. Here’s to those of you from Texas up through the American Heartland into eastern Canada who will be experiencing totality (including Dayton, Ohio where I mostly grew up).
I also note this from FlightRadar 24: Air Canada flight 1070 will fly entirely within the path of totality for the total eclipse – from Dallas to Montreal.
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