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[psykomies]

Read This If You Are Afraid.

The book you are holding in your hands was written from a country I never intended to visit. It is the story of a journey through the landscape of the skull, a map of the territory one inhabits after the world has ended and somehow, impossibly, begun again. On November 27, 2021, a violent, internal wind ripped through my mind, and the man I had been for fifty years collapsed on the floor of his apartment. The clinical term is a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage. But this sterile language fails to capture reality. It was detonation, a severing. The life I had known was over. In the initial aftermath, in the fog of the hospital, I was a ghost. My body was a prison, my memory a sieve, my native language the only one I could speak. I was a stranger to myself. This book is the chronicle of how, step by painful step, I began the long walk back. But this is not simply a memoir of sickness and recovery. It is, I hope, something more. It is a warrior's field manual, written from the front lines. It is a philosophical exploration of what it means to be broken and what it takes to become whole again. It is an honest account of the rage, the regret, the profound loneliness, and the unexpected moments of grace that define this path. In these pages, you will meet my "team of angels"—the doctors, nurses, and therapists of the Japanese healthcare system whose professionalism and kindness provided the vessel for my healing. You will meet the "Good Morning Man," a fellow patient who taught me a painful, unforgettable lesson about compassion and my own limitations. You will meet Nagi, a wise Siamese cat whose life and death were inextricably woven into the fabric of my own fate. Most importantly, you will be invited into a dialogue. Each chapter is structured uniquely. It begins with the raw, narrative account of my experience. It is followed by my own rational reflections, looking back at the clarity that time and distance provide. After that, I have included a "Dr. Jung's Corner," where Dr.Andreas Jung analyzes the deeper, archetypal patterns at play in my story. Finally, each chapter concludes with a series of "Hints for Stroke Survivors", practical and spiritual advice distilled from the crucible of my journey, interpreted by Dr. Andreas Jung. I wrote this book for one reason: to make sense of what happened to me. But my hope is that it will serve a second purpose. If you are a survivor of a stroke or any other life-shattering trauma, I hope you find a piece of your own story here. I hope you feel seen. If you are a caregiver, a family member, or a friend to someone who is suffering, I hope this book offers a glimpse into the complex inner world of the person you are trying to help. The path of recovery is not a straight line. It is a spiral, circling the same themes of loss, acceptance, and willpower again and again, each time from a slightly different elevation. This book is a snapshot of my own spiral path. My battle is not over. But I have learned that the objective is not to win the war by returning to who I once was. The victory lies in becoming the person I am now: a warrior who knows his terrain, a student who is not ashamed to be a rookie, and a man who is profoundly, painfully, and miraculously still here. Thank you for joining me on the journey. Alex -------------------------------------------------

Living in Japan for 21 years taught me the beauty of impermanence. My book combines this philosophy with Western logic.

- Podcast: tinyurl.com/nhdazbkb

- Hashtags: #MementoMori, #LegacyPlanning, #AreYouReadyToDie, #Stoicism, #AuthorLife

- Poll URL: https://tinyurl.com/3d3zbxab

[psykomies]

Living in Japan for 21 years taught me the beauty of impermanence. My book combines this philosophy with Western logic.

Podcast: tinyurl.com/nhdazbkb

Hashtags: #MementoMori, #LegacyPlanning, #AreYouReadyToDie, #Stoicism, #AuthorLife

Poll URL: https://tinyurl.com/3d3zbxab

Book URL: https://tinyurl.com/y7s9pmnz

[psykomies]

The Time Is Ticking...

You have 29,200 days if you're lucky. Subtract your age, and the number shrinks fast. Today burned 365 of them, and you'll never get them back. Stop pretending there's a reserve tank of time waiting somewhere. There isn't.

[psykomies]

Time is the only asset you cannot invest; you can only spend it.

Time stands apart from every other resource we possess. Unlike money, which can be saved, invested, and multiplied, time moves in only one direction—forward, and always at the same unyielding pace. Each moment that passes is gone forever, converted irreversibly into memory, regret, achievement, or waste.

This fundamental truth carries a weight that we often fail to appreciate in our daily lives. We speak casually of "spending time" as if we're making a transaction, but there's no getting change back, no opportunity to reinvest our hours for compound returns. A billionaire and a beggar both receive the same 24 hours each day, and neither can purchase a single minute more.

The cruel beauty of this constraint is that it forces prioritization in its purest form. Every yes to one activity is an implicit no to countless others. When we choose to scroll mindlessly through our phones, we're not just passing time—we're spending an irreplaceable portion of our existence, trading minutes that could have been used to create, connect, or grow for a fleeting distraction that evaporates the moment we look away.

This may be why moments of true presence feel so precious: they represent time spent with intention rather than squandered through inattention. The question isn't whether we'll spend our time—that's inevitable—but whether we'll spend it on what truly matters before the account runs empty.

[psykomies]

The Mathematics of Time

Time occupies a peculiar place in mathematics—simultaneously the most familiar and most mysterious parameter we work with. We measure it, calculate with it, and build elaborate theories around it, yet its mathematical nature reveals deep questions about reality itself.

Time as a Coordinate

In classical mechanics, time appears as a simple real number, a coordinate on the one-dimensional line ℝ. We write t ∈ ℝ and treat it algebraically like any other variable. Yet this mathematical convenience masks profound assumptions. When we say time flows from past to future, we're imposing an arrow—an orientation—on this line that distinguishes it from spatial coordinates.

Newton conceived of absolute time: a universal parameter ticking uniformly throughout the universe, independent of any observer or physical process. Mathematically elegant, this gave us differential equations where dt represented an infinitesimal moment, the same for everyone, everywhere.

Discrete vs. Continuous

Is time continuous—a smooth manifold—or fundamentally discrete? If discrete, what is the Planck time (~10⁻⁴³ seconds) telling us? Some approaches to quantum gravity suggest spacetime itself is granular at this scale, perhaps described by combinatorial structures rather than manifolds. Time might be an integer count rather than a real number.

Alternatively, in approaches like causal set theory, time emerges from the combinatorial structure of events and their causal relations. The mathematics shifts from analysis to order theory and graph theory. Time becomes not a container but a pattern in how events can influence each other.

The Arrow of Time

Mathematically, most fundamental equations are time-reversible: replace t with −t and the equations still hold. Yet thermodynamics introduces an arrow through entropy. The second law—that entropy tends to increase—breaks time symmetry statistically without altering the underlying reversible microscopic laws.

This emergence of irreversibility from reversible dynamics remains mathematically subtle. Ergodic theory and statistical mechanics provide frameworks, but explaining why entropy was low at the universe's beginning—why there's a gradient to climb at all—remains open.

Imaginary Time

In quantum field theory and cosmology, sometimes we perform a "Wick rotation," replacing real time t with imaginary time τ = it. This mathematical trick converts the Minkowski metric into a Euclidean one, making calculations tractable. But Hawking suggested imaginary time might be physically real in quantum cosmology, eliminating the singularity at the Big Bang by making time "curve back" on itself like a spatial dimension.

Whether this is physics or mathematical formalism remains debated, but it shows how flexible our mathematical conception of time can be when pushed to extremes.

Conclusion

The mathematics of time reveals it as far stranger than everyday experience suggests. It's simultaneously a parameter, a dimension, a measure, an ordering, and perhaps an illusion. Each mathematical framework—Newton's absolute time, Einstein's relativistic spacetime, quantum mechanics' evolution parameter, thermodynamics' arrow—captures some aspect while leaving others mysterious.

Perhaps time isn't one thing but many, and our mathematical descriptions, however elegant, are various approximations to something we don't yet fully understand. The mathematics doesn't just describe time—it reveals the depths of what we don't know about this most basic feature of existence.