Time is the only dimension that mankind has not yet mastered. Technology can put us anywhere on the planet (even off the planet) at increasingly fast speeds. But, no matter what happens, what you are trying to do, where you are trying to go, time is the only thing that will not bend on this earth. These seconds will tick away at the same pace no matter what happens.
There are three categories of time: the past, the present, and the future. There’s nothing you can do about the past except learn from it and plan with this new knowledge in mind. The present is always moving. The moment you are reading this line, the present has just moved to the past. The present therefore never exists: it is a frontier between the past and the future.
That leaves us with the future. Believe it or not, you can predict the future: you simply need to plan. If you plan a meeting, chances are that this meeting will occur. The future is simply a constantly changing plan. The plan keeps changing because the past is giving us knowledge and information that provoke decisions that change the plan and therefore alters the future.
You can therefore change the future at any time. A plan is only a plan until it happened. It only becomes reality once it has past that present frontier. This means that you have control of the plan all the way up until the last moment before it becomes part of the past.
In order to illustrate this new bit of power you didn’t know you had, let me make an analogy. It’s like driving a car on the highway; you look on the side and the scenery is moving fast. You see that exit coming up (the future) and stare at it until you’re upon it and it zooms by and all of the sudden it’s behind you. Since you’re in the driver’s seat, you can change directions, take that exit and change highways at any time BEFORE it zooms by. Once you’ve past the exit, you won’t back up on the highway. That exit is now in the past and if your plan was to take the exit, it’s too late. You need to change plans, take another exit and change routes. You’re now changing your future by reacting to the past.
All right, so maybe this is a little too philosophical but my point is that a schedule or a plan can be changed all the way up to the time that it’s executed. Imagine thousands of individuals constantly changing plans every day. That’s a lot of changes for those of you who are allergic to change. In order to make you feel better, tell yourself this quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The only constant is change’.