I was given a gift of time today. My wife and daughter were heading to workshop/event at the new Cookware-ish store in town. It was all about grinding and blending your own spices. My daughter does this quite a bit already, and my wife was interested. I got to tag along into town, although not to the event. I pulled into a coffee shop only about a block and a half from cookware store, ordered myself a green tea and piece of blueberry cake (YUM!). The place was pretty busy, but I found a good place to sit and read until they came to get me to go to lunch.

Now, it’s not really unusual for me to at least TRY to block chunks of time for reading and writing, but it’s usually in my Office/Man Cave at home and there is always something to distract me, not the least my computer. However, now there was no computer….just me and my Kindle. And an hour and a half of open time to read. What a treat! I’d been looking forward to this as much I was looking forward to going out to lunch afterwards.

Even though it was a little noisy there (it is a coffee shop after all, and is by definition a community space and place to chat.), I found it very easy to take on longer chunks of certain books that I find consume more of my cognitive energy than some. The book that I made the most headway in is “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene. At a high level, this book goes into the thought, math, physics, and philosophy in much of quantum science, multiverse theories, and theories of perception and reality. Greene is very good writer. I believe this is the fourth book of his that I’ve read. Quantum science and physics have fascinated me for a long time, despite the fact that the math behind it all is many light-years beyond what I can get. Greene doesn’t really dwell on the math, though, which is kind of him. He works hard at explaining in a way that allows me to “tag along” in my understanding. This is a good model for me.

Normally I can only get though about 5 to 10 pages of this before I get distracted or overwhelmed by the subject. NOT TODAY! Thanks to the less distracted block of time and the power of green tea and cake(!), I ploughed through about 40 – 45 pages of multiverse models, and philosophical approaches to the different impacts these models may have on our perception of reality, not to mention what reality might actually be. Fun Stuff!

I reached a good place to pause in quantum science for the moment and switched to some fiction. I’m in the third book of a large story arc by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter entitled “First Born”. I’m closing in on the end of the book (about 80 or so pages left) so things are accelerating to a close and I’m caught up in the story’s momentum. Then my daughter and wife showed up to get me so we could all head to lunch. That kind of yanked me out of the fiction world suddenly, but I knew I would have time later in the day to return to it and find a decent landing spot to pause; I’d either land there or charge through to the end.

I’d forgotten how satisfying being able to do this is…