In Kolkata recently, I experienced this firsthand. I was conducting research for my latest book. I had a schedule I expected to keep. I had a plan that I expected to work. Neither lasted very long. For starters, it was monsoon season, and this meant even more power outages and traffic hassles than usual. When I eventually reached people, they were neither available nor unavailable, so I found myself stuck in a humid purgatory. The hotel clerk took pity on me, pointing out that in Hindi, the word for tomorrow is the same as the word for yesterday. I began to see that I needed to let go of my rigid expectation of time as something linear and immutable, and I needed to relinquish the illusion of control.