His night had been disturbed by the aches from his healed ribs. He had not dreamt badly but his moments of wakefulness had been dominated by the word “atrophy” – increasing disorder in systems – and the concept of what humans have evolved to experience and rationalise as “time” being atrophy divided in consciousness by days and nights and measured by clocks.

His excitement had come at the realisation – in what’d been an earlier happy barely conscious state of wandering thoughts – that atrophy had profound implications not only for himself and the other everyday systems like his wife and his bedside table but for the universe itself.

The processes and forces of atrophy moved in only one direction. They might be slowed or resisted but not ultimately halted and certainly not reversed. There being no ‘things’ but only complex systems of atomic and molecular arrangement subject to atrophy meant that every “thing” would eventually and at different rates change in one direction: break down – die – and become disordered.

There had been discussion and argument about whether the expanding universe would expand to become a static void with its forces spent or whether it would cease expansion and contract again to its state before the big bang. The consensus among physicists – to the best of his knowledge – was now that the dark, spent, atrophied, void was the destiny of the universe. Atrophy – time – would not be turned back. There would be no time machines; no dodging the ultimate disorder.

Death was, then, simply a system breakdown, a transformation of matter, a dissipation of energy, a failure of resistance against atrophy. One might zig-zag and delay but it will come. There will be a final loss of consciousness, a final shut down of the system and then decay. The system would scream and rail against it but it would come.

Bhudda was right about at least one thing, that trying grasp – to hold on to – situations, relationships, objects, one’s consciousness – only brings suffering. The world as a system flows and won’t be stopped. It only flows in one direction. Change is a fact. Atrophy acts even if one sits still in the lotus position and concentrates on the feeling of air entering and leaving one’s nostrils. But..

We experience atrophy intensely but call it “time”. We are driven to measure it by the earth’s rotation around its axis and around the sun – in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes. We discipline our lives around it – in order to live with others, share experience, meet each other and meet commitments. Time is thus a socialising concept. We set our clocks to match those of others. Clocks are a desperate attempt to bring order. We even try to sleep and dream our disordered dreams by them.

As a human system – even if intimately connected to all there is – he was very attached to conscious living. Conscious awareness had been incredibly vivid and emotional for this human system. Far more so than for a chair that didn’t live but might exist as a systematic arrangement of atoms for longer. Death would mean all his rich memory and limited knowledge would be lost, deleted, pointless. He was unhappy with that arrangement. He wanted to hang on. He suffered under the weight a profound and vivid sentimentality for his possibly illusory self.

He was quite attached to himself for those days.