You’re on a treadmill. There are numbers on the dashboard in front of you as you hustle and sweat. Odometers, speedometers, pulse meters, calorie counters, chronometers. Moving, flashing numbers.
And you can change their settings as you go nowhere fast.
This morning, as you hop onto the moving track and adjust the speed and elevation settings, the thought hits you that it would be pretty cool if you could also adjust the timer to make minutes go faster.
Impossible? Not so fast. Didn’t Einstein say something about time being relative? And you realize you don’t need a time-changing button to press. You’ve got something relatively more effective. A good book.
Your e-reader can be propped on the treadmill’s dashboard, and there’s a novel on its screen with a story that’s so absorbing, you forget about the miles—and the minutes—whipping by. When you’ve got a good book, the numbers on your treadmill’s timer flip, flash and change as they speed you through time.
Today, the story was a riveting spy adventure by a longtime favorite writer, so you get to the end of your half-hour in what seems like a few minutes. In fact, you don’t want to leave the story, so you walk even further into the future.
Later, you muse about books and treadmill timers. You realize that while there’s no setting that will adjust the actual elapsed speed on your dashboard the way you adjust the speed of miles, a good book gets the job done.
And somewhere Einstein is nodding his shaggy head at this theory.