You know the feeling, its scorching urgency, its icy impossibility: to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience and snip out the wrong turn, the wrong word, the wrong investment of the heart.

It can’t be done without bending the universe, without undoing the second law of thermodynamics.

Our relationship to time is the single most important relationship of our lives, the substrate upon which all other relationships graft. To keep it from being one of bondage, it is useful to imagine how time might work on other worlds, because these thought experiments give us scale models of different ways of orienting to time in this world. It is useful to remember that we can always begin again.

And so, a poem:

COVER SONG FOR THE SECOND LAW
by Maria Popova

Let time begin again
this one not a river
but a fountain
pouring in every direction
into a pool of itself
at the center
of the sunlit plaza
of the possible

and we

corpuscles of mist
gilded for a moment
before we drop
to wash the pennies
of the dead

and then begin again.

Couple with Hannah Arendt on forgiveness as the antidote to the irreversibility of life, then revisit Robin Jeffers’s epic poem “The Beginning at the End.”