Today as he took a wrong turn, he found himself walking right into his yesterday. Reliving a day you had just spent can be quite boring. Grudging, he decided that tomorrow he’d be taking the right turn. But when he woke up the next morning, it was still the continuation of yesterday. So he was unable to take the right turn because he was living in the past and the past is unchangeable.
Then, one day he heard an alarm clock somewhere and came up with a plan. He decided to set an alarm clock exactly one minute before the 24th hour from now, so that the next day the alarm clock would go off at the same hour, breaking the recurrence.
The next morning, just one minute to the 24th hour, he heard the alarm clock. He was jubilated. He suddenly came up with a plan. He decided to set an alarm clock exactly one minute before the 24th hour from now, so that the next day the alarm clock would go off at the same hour, breaking the recurrence.
Caught in a loop. This is like a taste of Kafka. There is a book called Knots by R.D. Laing that has poems like this, describing little psychological cul-de-sacs we get stuck in sometimes.
Here’s a short one:
If I don’t know I don’t know
I think I know
If I don’t know I know
I think I don’t know