Lost in Time

That was the key to survival—doing better tomorrow than you did today. Getting up every day and improving.

Whoever thought books didn’t save lives was so very wrong.

There was no single meaning of life—there was only the meaning of your life.

Our future is written in the past, and it's the adventure of a lifetime.

Time and life had taught her one thing: you do all you can, and at some point, it’s either enough or it’s not. The tides of a life and your efforts either carry you in. Or sink you.

It happens. Life is about getting up. Not avoiding falling down.

sometimes life gives you problems you can’t solve today. That’s what tomorrow is for. And that’s why you keep going.

Actually, I think wine-induced soul outpouring is exactly what this world needs right now. Even if it gets awkward. It’s totally worth it.

as she opened the door, she saw the young woman she had once been,

If you eliminate all other possibilities, what remains must be the correct answer.

People with nothing to lose were the most dangerous thing in the world.

In a world where your strength is insignificant against the forces around you, swimming against the current hurts only one person: you.

The best lean in. And they treat you the same. They know you’ve changed, but they see the old you, and that’s what they remind you of. They treat you like the person you were before. They are your tether to your true self.

Do you know the biggest mistake people make?” “Asking rhetorical questions?” She smiled. “Making up their minds before they have all the facts.

the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

Sam held his hands out. “Time and gravity are linked. For example, if the gravity pulling against my right hand was twice as strong as the gravity acting upon my left, do you know what would happen?” “Your right hand would be pulled to the ground.” “That’s technically true, but assume I can exert a counterforce sufficient to keep my hand where it is. Think about it in the context of time.” Adeline shrugged. “Strong gravity slows time,” Sam explained. “In fact, for my right hand, time would pass at half the rate of my left. If you had a time-lapse camera and watched these hands for years, you would see my left begin to wrinkle and discolor while my right barely aged. That is gravity’s effect on time. But our breakthrough was about the third piece of the puzzle: energy.” Sam let his hands drop. “Did you know that according to general relativity, any form of energy is a source of gravity?

time heals all wounds. But it won’t work if you don’t give time a chance.

no single meaning of life—there was only the meaning of your life.

She marveled then that one never knew what they were made of until their back was against the wall.

That was the way of the world, he thought: you give it your all; sometimes it’s enough, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes, the tide carries you in.

And then the shock she helped give the world: Absolom. It wasn’t the announcement of Absolom that changed the world. It was when they saw its power. That day was a Saturday in November. Adeline thought the government had selected a weekend for the first departure for several reasons. The most important was so that the world could watch. They told the press it was so the victims’ families could be present to witness the sentence carried out. That morning, those families stood in the viewing booth, mothers and fathers and their children—at least, the children the man in the Absolom chamber hadn’t taken from them. He stared at his victims’ families with hate-filled eyes. That fire vanished as the machine began to vibrate. Fear took its place. He opened his mouth and screamed, but no one could hear it. A flash filled the chamber, and he was gone. So was the world before. Overnight, crime rates plummeted. Adeline had always heard the saying that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. That’s what Absolom was to the world: a new devil. Prison was a known. So was the death penalty. They were the devils the world knew. Conceptually, the world knew what Absolom was: a box that sent a person to the past, in an alternate universe. What they didn’t know was what truly happened there. Exile was certain. A lonely death was certain. But how? An exotic disease? Starvation? Being torn apart by an animal? In the absence of certainty, a mind tends to imagine the worst. That’s what Absolom became to the world. The phrase “A fate worse than Absolom” quickly supplanted its predecessor: “A fate worse than death.” Before the first departure, the Absolom machine had been an idea. In those small moments as it hummed to life, the world saw something else: a person who was pure evil, with hate in his heart, instantly hollowed out, gutted, cowering with fear, and then, gone. In an instant, they saw evil wiped from existence.

That was the advantage of time. It conditioned the heart to the worst assaults. Or maybe it was natural to feel less as one grew older. Maybe a mind could develop scar tissue too. Emotional scar tissue.

Remember this: people matter. The history of capitalism is fundamentally about people. Great companies are built by great people. That’s the key to making market-beating returns—spotting those people.

But the worst part was the final realization: that the act of transporting something with Absolom essentially branched our universe—it created an alternate timeline where the payload was deposited. This is consistent with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the idea that we are constantly creating copies of our universe, even as we speak.

Relativity proved that gravity and energy are essentially manifestations of the same thing. In particular, both distort the curvature of space-time. Our breakthrough is that we could use increasingly large amounts of energy to modify gravity and distort space-time, essentially causing a specific object to be displaced in space and time.

Strong gravity slows time,” Sam explained. “In fact, for my right hand, time would pass at half the rate of my left. If you had a time-lapse camera and watched these hands for years, you would see my left begin to wrinkle and discolor while my right barely aged. That is gravity’s effect on time. But our breakthrough was about the third piece of the puzzle: energy.

The second thing she told me is something I think about a lot: time heals all wounds. But it won’t work if you don’t give time a chance. That was her point: we just have to accept that sometimes things are going to be hard for a while. If we’re strong enough—if we hold on long enough—things will get better. Every year, this hurt we feel is going to get a little better. I promise you.

Sam snorted. “I’m a widower with a teen and a pre-teen at home. By the known laws of physics and human biology, I cannot survive without alcohol.