Most people see life as a linear progression, a canoe ride on the river of time. The scenery passes. The sun rises and sets. Occasionally there is a storm.

It’s a tempting metaphor because we often think of time flowing like a river, and to see ourselves as passengers on that river is a natural extension. But my life hasn’t been like that and I’ll bet yours hasn’t either.

I see us as boulders tumbling down a mountainside, our rough edges smoothed by all the hard places we encounter that make us older and wiser.

We’re not often sure which way is up.

Time is the gravity we cannot resist, the energy behind this avalanche called life. Before a thing is dealt with another is upon us and as we turn to it we’re bumped from behind because we don’t have time for this while the telephone rings and someone is at the door and then we go over a cliff.

I didn’t see that coming. Did you?

It’s hard to tell a person who you are because you are so many things.

Quantum Theory was born when Werner Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle in 1927. He wrote, ‘It is impossible to determine accurately both the position and the direction and speed of a particle at the same instant.’ His Uncertainty Principle opened the door to Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry, the mapping of chaotic systems.

Like you and me, Heisenberg lived the avalanche.

– Roy H. Williams,
The Monday Morning Memo, Nov. 21, 2011