Reflections and Horizons*

I only ever seem to turn to my blog in times when I am in abundant demand of comfort, security and familiarity. In some aspects, I see my blog as my way of time travelling - back to simpler times, back to times when I had the time to ponder on the reflections and muse on the future horizons. Back to when I was younger. 

Why is that? Several reasons. Time seems to stand still when I see this blog. I started this blog when I was sixteen. Sixteen, I tell you. A sixteen year old starting her very first blog, hell that should speak encyclopedias about my personality. And every time I wish I could go back to... well, when everything was seen through a sixteen year old's eyes again, I seem to find that solace in this blog. 

Of course, time neither pauses nor changes its pace for anyone. The blogs I once stalked, the bloggers I once knew, the windows I had the chance to peep through to experience life in a different world (metaphorical windows, of course... in a non-creepy way. Yeah.) have all now changed. Either they stopped blogging or their lives took a different turn and they didn't feel like sharing it on their blog. 

When I was sixteen, I well and truly believed in the 'eternal'. I believed in the depth of the bonds we created, with everything from our jobs to our hobbies to our loved ones. I found it hard to understand why people would let go of something good. To be honest, I think I still feel the same way. I thought happy families I read about from other blogs would last, the Hindi movies bloggers loved to write reviews about would continue, that people would keep on churning out post after post because of the love they had for it. 

I have always had a romantic viewpoint of the eternal nature of things. Like that old adage about fine wine and good cheese goes, I believed the bonds would simply become stronger and deeper with time. I could not comprehend a world where ideas, beliefs and personalities would change, and what once tasted sweet could turn sour. I was - and still am - too in love with the idea of looking back in time at how a bond has grown, evolved and stood with us through all these years. I don't even like 'How I Met Your Mother' (ever since they ruined that ending), but Lily's porch test really applies here. I believed when we were old and looked back on our lives, sitting on the porch, I always imagined reflecting on the passion and continuity of one thing growing and become a beautiful, eternal part of our lives. I always imagined looking back on memories of things, places, people we have committed to, and which have equally also stood by us. I prefer continuity. (I also think that is a huge part of why I get really upset when they cancel really good TV shows - but that's another rant for another day...!)

And yes, if I really wanted to go into it, and really bore the grand total of the three readers who peruse my blog, I can relate it so very easily to having never had continuity growing up. I moved towns, then countries, and I never had the same core group of friends from my childhood onwards. My blog, in all honesty, is one of rare things from my younger years that has always been there, that has always provided continuity. 

All of this is rather ironic, of course, if you knew the chaos that was going on in the practical aspects of my life...! The practical aspects of my life are anything but continuous at present. I don't really know which direction I am going in, or where I will end up. I hold on very strongly to that sense of continuity and belonging, almost as my own Pursuit of Happyness. Not because I think that is the only way to be happy, but because I know nothing else but sustainability would work for me. 

Broken bonds and bonds illusioned by a depth that was never there are a part of life, and I know I have learned this lesson very, very well. And much as I moan about it, I know deep down, I don't really wish to fast-forward to a life where I am settled and making all the memories for my Porch Wala Scrapbook already, because that means missing out on all the beginnings. The anticipation of a new relationship, the first moment when you know you really connect with a friend, the high you feel when you realise you really enjoy doing something you never thought you would like. And on all the 'middles' - the doubts, the uncertainties, the shakiness of the bonds that serve to strengthen the bond much later, the failures, the struggles. These are all worth it. I may not be an expert, but I feel like I can say this with some authority on the subject because I have, at some time or another, failed in every single aspect of my life. And trust me, you do not want to miss out on the middle. Not just because the middle shapes you and strengthens the depth of your bond, but because that is as much a part of the journey as the beginning. They are just as important memories to make. There is beauty in misery too - ask any poet or musician. 

Why am I writing all this? Sarah Kay once said of the poems she writes, that she uses them as a medium to understand things she has trouble with. And that sometimes when she gets to the end of the poem, she realises that she has figured out what it's about. That is often how I feel when I start blogging - or indeed, writing. Perhaps the point of this post was for me to calm down about the lack of continuity in life, or to celebrate the continuity, nostalgia and time travel that this blog has provided for me, for nearly the past ten years. 

In an age where a significant part of our culture is mired in transience, I always found it nice to seek out my blog when I look for a way to reconnect with who I was, reflect on where I am, and think ahead to what the oncoming horizon brings. 

(Sunrise somewhere in Florida.)

*It's me. If I didn't come up with a suitably hipster title for my blog, I would pretty much need a brain scan right about now.

I Have a Crush on Atticus Finch (or: How English Literature Saved My Life)

For the uninitiated, I work in the clinical field by profession. My daily grind involves making concrete decisions based on the evidence available to me, and my own understanding of the how the various machines within the human body work with each other in a given clinical setting with imposed external forces. It is a constant learning curve in logic, reasoning, and deduction – as the Gilmore Girls would say, I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes. (Or maybe Watson. Or the sidekick that gives Sherlock Holmes his coffee in the morning. Or… yeah, you get the picture.). We monitor and measure everything. Quite literally like The Police’s evergreen stalker song, ‘every breath you take’ is watched by us. Every rise and fall in your blood pressure, every millilitre of pee you produce, every drop of fluid you drain from your lungs – hell, even every single step you take is observed by us like hawks. Medicine almost has its own language. A language of acronyms and idioms of the various processes and our tricks and potions used, to express how someone poops, pees, farts, belches, coughs and pukes, which we learn to become fluent in as time progresses, and as thus (and particularly with its unusual setting of being in contact with members of the non-scientific public in a scientific environment), is often seen as an art: because we learn to translate these figures into what it means for you as a sick, scared, lonely person lying on a hospital bed, bunking with five other dudes and constantly forgetting where you are and who these nice people in blue who give you pills to take are, instead of being in your twenties and scoring hot chicks like you must have done, back in your days.

But really, despite it being an art – and a wonderful, rewarding, self-fulfilling one at that – the art that really saved me, and the art that I am more excited to share with you than any amount of medical gobbledegook, is the art of words. Being a deaf person (also for the uninitiated – yes, I am hearing impaired), ironically, words became my life at a very young age. Words allowed me to literally visualise what my malfunctioning ears could not hear. Have you ever tried being cut off from one of your five-a-life senses when you were a seven year old? It is daunting. It is life on mute button. Communication on mute button. It is a specialised, short-cut route to Living In Your Own Bubble.

And then words came. In the mind of a deaf seven year old girl, they were suddenly everywhere. (Of course, in the mind of a semi-rational twenty four year old still-a-girl, my perception of the words around me had improved. So they just seemed to be everywhere. Which they already were. I just didn’t see it.) Words came in the form of subtitles on television, in the form of notes on the blackboard, song lyrics on websites, in text messages and the chat box of MSN messenger. Suddenly, the mute button disappeared. I had a way to link my existence to the rest of the world! I now have the keys to escape Living In Your Own Bubble!

Was life that simple? Of course, everyone who has lived even a minute into the adult world (Hint: it involves your eyes widening in excited anticipation of opening your first ever letter addressed to you, ohmygoshhowEXCITING… and promptly your face falling when you realise it is a bill for the implausible amounts of electricity you have used. My advice would be to switch to a lifetime of candles, and who needs the internet anyway?!) will be able to answer that with a resounding ‘no’. You see, in classic Sunrise fashion, as if it wasn’t complicated enough being the deaf little girl in a foreign country with an Indian accent, I decided to add to the complications by just never being a regular girl. It is now such a widely known fact that I have decided to stop pretending I am remotely ashamed of it. I have just never fit in at primary school, or secondary school (or university, but by default, there were other, equally mad hatters like myself so by default, I fit in despite not fitting in, so we will leave that one out). I was always that different girl, for lack of a nicer expression. I watched Bollywood in a land of Boyzone, N’Sync and Vengaboys, I naively went home to my parents in a culture of hanging out to check out boys after school in rolled-up skirts and loosened ties (as Lorelai Gilmore would say, Britney Spears would have been inspired. Now I have that song stuck in your head, don’t I? Oh baby baby.), and I was the girl that was picked last for team sports. Suffice to say, ‘popularity’ wasn’t high on my list of Things To Do Before I Leave High School.

So what does a deaf girl who has come to see words as her bridge to communication do? She seeks that same sense of love that comes from human contact in books, of course. Seems I had bought a one-way ticket back to Living In Your Own Bubble. And oh, how I loved it! I got to go on adventures with the Famous Five, become best friends with the Naughtiest Girl, have a bunch of girlfriends for sleepovers with the Sleepover Club, develop my high school crushes along with Sweet Valley’s famous twins, and understand courage and magic through Harry and his crew. Words carved delicately into the pages, each one flowing onto the next one, each one a living proof of the one thing we all crave for – love. The love with which the author has created a world with those words, were read and absorbed by me with equal love. Those words had given me a friend I really needed. I had fallen in love with art.

I developed a lot as a person with reading. Words taught me to understand the relative differences between right and wrong. Words taught me to appreciate the grey area of human emotions, and of human relationships. And nowhere have words taught me so much as – very unimaginatively – within the four walls of my English classes in secondary school. It has taken me eight years after forever leaving English Literature classes behind, to realise how much my English teachers shaped my thinking, and my love for literature. I had arrived at my English Literature lessons a fresh child with a blind (rather, deaf) love for words, and my English teachers taught me how to tease more out of that love, and challenged me to go hiking with that love to places I have never been to, to question what I have been told, and to question what the world around me really is, to understand the bigger things of life – politics, race, culture, identity, justice, rights, finances, philosophy, religion, law and, I’m sure, much, much more. I realised I was at my happiest when I was analysing what sections of a book meant, what they meant to me, and what they could mean to others, and why the writer chose those words instead of others. I thrived on the excitement of discovering new ways the same set of words can be understood, and through appreciating the genius of writers for writing in such a way, I learned to love words more. They were truly art, and they were art in an itch-scratchingly satisfying way; I could feel myself expressed through them, and I could feel a connection. A communication. Whether the mute button was on or off did not matter any more.

It was also then I was introduced to a man who I later realised would be the love of my life: Atticus Finch. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ truly has to be mentioned as a book milestone in my life. It was the first ‘grown up novel’ I have ever read, and it was the first time I had explored new horizons: from reading for imagination, to reading for thought. And this reading for thought was what drove me – nay, compelled me – to start to pen my own thoughts down, too. I watched others’ beautifully sculpted words, and I wanted to do the same.

Looking back on it, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ was also a life-changing moment for me; it was the first time I had realised I thrived far better in social sciences, than I do in clinical sciences. Setting to paper my thoughts on the creative beauty of those words, and the intelligence of their social expression, was such a high for me. And this love of understanding social expression grew further with my history lessons. I learned to think. I learn to explore with my thoughts. I understood what it meant to be ‘lost in thoughts’.

Eight years later, looking down the various souvenirs of bricks, stones and pebbles I had laid down with the path of my life, I can look back and see how much I owe to the written word. (And how much I owed to my circumstances of turning deaf and being a freshie.) I carry the torch of my obsession for expression and writing with great joy (and likely, great annoyance of my friends). Like newlyweds engaging in certain physical activities, I engage in debates wherever and whenever I can, whatever time of day or night, on whatever the topic. I read about the world, and I rant about the injustices of it. I learn from my own poor judgement in narrow thinking. I show others the fallacy of their poor judgement in narrow thinking. I absorb all the grey, non-measurable qualities of life, and I keep wanting to absorb more, knowing the lessons to be learnt are infinite. Words led me to my passion.

Through various stages in my life, I have been complimented for being a good writer. I don’t think this is true. I think the truth is, the power of my thoughts are in themselves tilting the weight of my poor writing in their favour. The thinker that I have become has saved me many times from my own insanity, helped me to cope with some of the biggest losses of my life, and allowed me to make sense of the jumbled mess that is my life. It has helped me to form deep, real, and very strong friendships. Which touchwood I hope will be for life. And I owe this all to the art that has brought me here in the first place: words.

Life wears you down

Trying times are integrated into our lives. If there was a God or a Master Plan above, He, She or It did not code and format our lives such that misery is not part of it. This is, of course, always a difficult lesson to learn. Sometimes, a sense of entitlement or naivety can cause us to almost be in denial that trying times can happen to us, that the world could be so cruel to us. The good guys.

But the reality is, life will always wear you down. It is literally physically, and logically, impossible for us to not become broken at some point or another. There are always calamities: deaths, financial troubles, break ups and not being able to eat the food we get cravings for. It is difficult to understand the purpose of our existence sometimes, when everything spirals out of control and the scoreboard mocks you with its triumphant ‘life 1 – 0 you’. It is difficult when you first start realising life wears you down.

(All (C) to Rotten e-Cards.)

This gives me great admiration for people who manage to remain kids at heart, throughout their lives. When I was younger, and I saw Growns Ups acting… well, Grown Up, I often wondered how they may have been as kids. How, and at what specific point, they morphed from wanting chocolates and watching cartoons, to a different state of mind of problem solving and taxes-managing adults. It always baffled me, because undergoing that metamorphosis seemed like an impossible concept to get my head around at that point.

In all honesty, it still does. Although I understand now (far better than I did a couple of months ago) how this change takes over our core way of living, it is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Perhaps I am in classic stage one of the five stages of grievance over the loss of my childhood (denial). Ha. (And yes, I count ‘childhood’ as up until I had to be a grown up with a job. Sue me!) But on a more serious note, it puzzles me how smoothly people who were once children transition into adults. Where do they get that strength from? Where do they get that courage and purpose to carry on from? Did life not wear them down?

This transition from childhood into adulthood is, for some like me, a very trying time in life; when the comfort of having a regular pattern of a friend-filled, activity-filled life where your actions had no real financial consequences is shed to reveal a thicker, more lonely layer of financial and career worries. School has provided for us a comfort zone where our next classes, courseworks and activities are clearly planned out, and emerging from that into the Grown Up world where contracts are time-dependent and performance-dependent, and you don’t know where your next scheduled activity could be, is a different ball game to reckon with.

It speeds you up and slows you down all at once. The constant meetings and ward rounds and deadlines and work-based activities leave you wondering where the day has gone, and yet when you look at your list of accomplishments for the week, you realise you have slowed down. You haven’t done half the things you wanted to do. The writing, the photography, the TV shows (but never Mindy. We solemnly swear we will always make time for Mindy.), the promised phone calls to friends.

What a funny paradox to live in. To realise life has, indeed, worn you down. The idealistic dreams are now replaced with practical bread-winning aspirations. And in turn, the bread-winning aspirations wear you down purely because you realise the idealism and the fantasising has gone. Slowly, like unwanted flies in the room, the questions creep in, demanding that you pay attention to them: who am I, what am I doing, why am I here? And the most painful one to answer – am I happy?

They say knowledge is power. And perhaps gaining the knowledge that life will wear you down – for some, straight out of university like myself, and for others, in the middle of their hard-earned careers, for instance – is our strongest weapon to fight the life blues. To know that there will come a time when we have to face the question, ‘Am I happy?’ and stare at our wounds and demons directly in the face and answer with brutal honesty. Regardless of how little we are left with when throw away the superficial and the unwanted. And change what we can, while crossing our fingers in the desperate hope that our personalities have developed enough over the years to accumulate a sense of humour enough to accept what cannot be changed…! The best person to laugh at is yourself, sometimes. Then maybe, somewhere along the way, we can hope to find a good balance between the demands of a Grown Up and the requirements to keep our childhood alive within us.

Livin' on a prayer...

Browsing through my archives, I found an old blog post of mine, which I have managed to retrieve at a very apt time in my life, particularly as I feel like I'm running around a lot and putting a lot of (unnecessary? necessary?) pressure on myself. 

It's amazing looking at the nineteen year old me... and realising I have not changed a single bit. Worrying, ain't it? Isn't it odd what you really need to hear... well... comes from within you? Quite literally?!

There comes a moment in your life when you just have to let yourself be. When you know you can learn learn learn explore explore explore keep on questioning, thinking, debating, discussing, testing yourself and pushing yourself to the limit... but sometimes just... being... existing is enough... 

Sometimes you have to just let that storm in that teacup be. I have a million and one thoughts and questions in my head right now, and I long to just sit with someone and talk the night away... but at the same time, I know that if that person was to be by my side right now, all I'd do is just sit there in silence.

There are so many things in this world to learn about, to experience, to talk about, to discuss and to constantly keep on stimulating yourself... but... I don't know how to explain it... it's like... the power of life itself is enough, because the presence of that body next to you is conversation enough in its own breathing silence, and you don't need any more answers. For that moment, at least. Maybe with a good drink (or three) in your hand. 

Just let yourself be.

And on that note, I go off to sleep....

And on that note, I go off to start my Friday morning. For anyone reading this, here's hoping the storm in your teacup is tempering itself down to a calmer rhythm, too!

(Fun fact: This photo was actually taken at sunrise, by Sunrise, around half an hour from my home town... wait, what, your mind isn't blown yet?! Sheesh. So much for trying to be poetic with the little boat and the rocks behind it that it's escaping the horizon in front of it that it is reaching out for, yadda yadda yadda...)

Single.

I've been lying awake (don't ask, my mind is still on North Carolina time... more about that trip, soon... maybe... uhh, one day?) for the past half an hour, contemplating this word. Single. It's a very huge and heavy word. Like I've mentioned previously on this blog before, I don't intend for this to become a girly, gossip-filled, he-said she-said advice column by writing this, but rather I hope to just pause and reflect for a while. Because, like, I've not done any pausing-and-reflecting on this blog before (see - well, uh - see a lot of my previous posts? I'm a fun person too, I swear!)... obviously.

(Can you tell I'm nervous writing this? Am I that transparent? Or did I just give myself away?)

For possibly the first time in a very long time, I have really started to embrace this word - single. I feel, though, that there are often different (no, not fifty...) shades of single. There is the single-but-still-emotionally-attached single, where you're single on paper (or, as is the social convenience nowadays, on Facebook) but you're not really over someone, you're still sitting and mulling over some things that were meant to be exorcised a long time ago, perhaps still wishing for a glimpse of those same rays of sunshine again. Then there is the single-but-you're-sleeping-with-someone single. This is surely a fun kind of single - no attachments, companionship (hell, maybe even the sacred F-word... friendship, you fools!), and a happy thought that there is still at least one person in the world left who thinks you are still attractive. Following on from this one is the single-but-interested-in-someone single - you're not bound to anyone, but there is a potential. He (or she) makes you grin, so you're going along with it. Testing waters but still free as a bird.

Finally, there is the very right-wing version of single. The shade that I have come to realise in the past couple of days, and especially the past half an hour, I have been wearing with me everywhere. The well-and-truly-single-in-the-most-dull-boring-and-true-sense-of-the-word single. The kind where you are single because there is no one you like, no one who likes you (in case you were looking for a bit of an ego-boost - well, 'hahahahahaha' is all that can be said...!), no one who is potentially going to make you grin (or even attempt a weak half-smile for), and there is literally not one spark of excitement in your life. This, folks, is the single single I am experiencing.

It feels... interesting. Solitary. 

I could spout y'all some bullshit about this new-found joy of being able to discover the real you and having time for yourself and finally being free to explore and clear out the cobwebs in your own mind... but, I am sorry, that is complete and utter bullshit. Whether in a relationship or not, I have always been the real me, even my fascinating door-stoppers of textbooks cannot stop me from making time for myself (and my sunrises) and there are just too many cobwebs in my mind for me to clear out anyway, single or otherwise. (So guys, if there's one semi-coherent thought you wish to take away from all this, it is this: never stop being the real you, whoever you are sharing your bed space with. Just sayin'.)

When I saw my cousin's family, and how they bloomed and blossomed from friendship to husband and wife to creating a family and a home and a life of their own, it makes me feel so incredibly happy for them. It also makes me realise what a blessing it must truly be, to live life in a world you have created for yourself, revolving around the people you really, I mean really, care for and love. It really reinforces how little, simple things can give you infinite joy and... meaning that no amount of travelling or zero-laden paychecks can hope to come close to.

But, like I said, this is neither a whinge nor a wish. It's just a reflection on how damn heavy it feels - single.

"Love someone Anwar, then you will know the truth of life."*

Living your life with love doesn't mean loving every one you come across to infinite insanity and back, it means to treat everyone with kindness. It has taken me a long, long, damn bloody long time to realise how unequivocally intertwined love and kindness are. Don't get me wrong, I was never a cruel person and I would never like to be so. But I never realised how much the best expressed form of love is kindness (although, of course, I would like to think I have been doing that throughout my life...). To love, really love, takes time and trust, but to be kind to everyone takes nothing, and yet the act says it right there and then, out loud, "I have love for you, and I want to share it with you and show you I care."

PS: Along with intelligence, I find kindness the single most attractive feature in a man. Why is being nice so under-rated?!

* The title is in reference to a dialogue from the Bollywood movie, Anwar.

On being 16 and turning 23...

Birthdays always have a way of bringing out the inner ponderer and 'reflection-er' in ourselves. What used to be a highly anticipated day turns into a long-dreaded day - the day from whence the number you tell people in reference to your age becomes that one digit higher. And of course, numbers on their own are often meaningless (and sometimes even within a social context, they are still meaningless... society, how complex thou art...), but the realisation they represent that you are well and truly in the realm of being an adult is what makes it so huge to me. I am, touchwood, extremely grateful for every day I get to be on this Earth and for the love I feel every day in my life, but being an adult is Goddamnshit crazy scary! I'm sorry, there is no eloquent way to phrase that sentiment, as far as I am concerned.

I was talking to a friend today, about getting older. He is two years older than me and he, I swear to God, still sees me as that naive nineteen year old kid I was when I first met him on the steps of our university campus's main square. He was musing over the ludicrosity of me being twenty three, amazed at how that naive, jumpy nineteen year old is going to be leading the life of a twenty three year old in the big smoke. It is indeed an odd thought. Maybe.

However, my answer to his musings was this: age has nothing to do with maturity, rather it is about gaining life experiences enough to equip oneself to survive the complexities of an ever increasingly entropic world. That is to say, I am still 'immature' and 'mature' (whatever the hell these words mean...) all within a matter of minutes, and while this expression of self is within my control, the external influences that shape my daily life do not wait for me but rather depend on my ability to learn to co-exist with their forces. And growing up is about understanding better with each passing year how to handle the complexities of greater responsibilities and rights, that enable us to be a part of this ecosystem called Life. Whether you behave like an 'adult' or like a 'child' is immaterial - that is a personal evolution and is far too complex to attach an consensual number to. (And, more importantly, we must ask - does it need a number attached to it?)

Going through this logic (well, it SEEMS like logic to me... make of it what you will!) brings me some comfort that the dreaded two and three next to one another need not be so dreaded after all. I have a tendency to live in the past and I will miss the past with each increasing year, but perhaps that is exactly what 'maturity' is about - accepting that as the years unfurl, the distance between the sixteen-year-old-you and the just-very-very-old-you keeps increasing. However much you try and hold on to that thread that binds you to what you once were, in those seemingly perfect, rose-tinted visions of days, there needs to be a time when you accept defeat that the thread is very, very thin now and it is OK to let it snap because the memories are yours and no one except Mr. Alzheimer can take them away from you now. Accepting that the laughter and the tears are all your souvenirs, now. You no longer need to try so hard to grip that thread so hard. Really.

But hey, who says I am mature now, eh? Whatever! Haha!

PS: Don't you just love the word 'entropy'? When I was sixteen and sitting in a Chemistry class on a winter's morning, my Chemistry teacher (who I still see as one of the best teachers I have ever had) tried to explain the concept of entropy to us. More than its scientific and physical value, I remember being so intrigued by its philosophical value. She used an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' to highlight the application of entropy in life to us, which I want to end this blog post on. This is brilliant reflection for anyone reading this.

"Imagine a cup of water falling off a table and breaking into pieces on the floor. If you take a film of this, you can easily tell whether it is being run forward or backward. If you run it backward you will see the pieces suddenly gather themselves together off the floor and jump back to form a whole cup on the table. You can tell that the film is being run backward because this kind of behavior is never observed in ordinary life. If it were, crockery manufacturers would go out of business.

The explanation that is usually given as to why we don’t see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics. This says that in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy’s law: things always tend to go wrong! An intact cup on the table is a state of high order, but a broken cup on the floor is a disordered state. One can go readily from the cup on the table in the past to the broken cup on the floor in the future, but not the other way round.

The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting."

 -- A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988)

PPS: If my blog wasn't called 'Lost in Thoughts', I may well have called it 'Entropy'. Hmmm.