Time-Being
These are my thoughts on 8/27/23 (ish)
It is ironic that I started this post on 8/27 with a few snippets of ideas, and it is now the evening of 9/13 before going to sleep after a ~13-hour day that I am getting the chance to finish an initial train of thought.
I do really enjoy when I am able to get moments of stillness and clarity and step away from the constant distractions and task switching that unfortunately are making up the bulk of my day-to-day, and so I think that the concept of time management and the limited amount of time we spend on this earth have been particularly salient in a lot of the media that I have come across.
It has been a few weeks now since the initial insight was sparked, but I want to get into the habit of writing some of my thoughts on various subjects relatively close to real-time in an unfiltered sort of way to try and capture some of the things that are on my mind. This has been helpful in journaling or even on past iterations of blogs which I am able to look upon with hindsight and see either the growth or regression that has taken place over time.
One such learning that I found to be quite meaningful in terms of changing the way I think or act is the habit I am beginning in this post, which is to document my thoughts or opinions with somewhat of a timestamp. I heard this in a book or podcast as a tool that an individual used to try and avoid the biases that come along with stating an opinion publicly and being tied to that opinion for the future. This can lead to doubling down or being resistant to new evidence and can get in the way of progress and learning.
If you instead consciously say that this is how I think or feel as of [today’s date], then, at least for me, I find it easier to avoid the bias and the associated cognitive dissonance with “changing” my beliefs, since by definition, my thoughts today should at least be different in some respects to my thoughts tomorrow or next week or next year. Even if the underlying assumptions or principles are the same, the experiences and surrounding thoughts of my life will undoubtedly be different.
Those of you who know me well know that I am prone to rambling and hopping from one train of thought to the next without realizing it and then eventually hitting a wall and circling back to my initial line of thinking. It is not uncommon in the course of a conversation for me to be asked a question, start down one path, and then later say, “What did you ask again? Oh yeah, so anyway…” To borrow from the wisdom so eloquently expressed above, to this day (9/13) I still think that this is a feature and not a bug. I think many of the best conversations and interactions I have had in my life have progressed nonlinearly and carried on in fits and starts abandoning dead ends early and without regard.
Even the above paragraph hilariously does not actually even make the point I was trying to make - namely, that I have yet to discuss the thought that sparked my wanting to make this post in the first place.
Essentially, across several different forms, articles, books, audiobooks, podcasts, or conversations, I have repeatedly come across the importance of time. Whether it is in relation to productivity hacks, the concept of Memento Mori, past trauma manifesting in the present, meditation, or even simply the nuance between joy and contentment, I have been thinking a lot about time and what I am doing with it (I bet language in and of itself will be the topic of one of these posts).
When thinking of our existence, it is a bit tricky, but at the root of it, one of the dimensions we exist in is time. In fact, this is really the only dimension that matters, for in our current concept of reality, time - past, present, and future - makes up the totality of history.
On the individual level, we only experience our lives as a series of moments in time. A profound concept, if one has not been exposed to it, is the fact that the past and future do not really “exist” and that all we ever have is now, which is the present moment, which is ever-fleeting.
The concepts of presence, stillness, and focusing on the moment at hand have been interesting to learn about from a meditation or flow-state perspective. Part of the difficulty that I had previously had with the intense focus on “now” being the only thing of consequence was the fact that I need to plan for the future, at least in some respects. If I don’t buy groceries, or work a job, or save for retirement, it would probably be tough for me when I need to have food or shelter at some point, huh? Then again there’s that story about the bird in the bible and God seemed to look out for that bird. But then again birds die vicious and horrific deaths daily and seem to be constantly fearing for their lives and survival. I’d personally like to be able to read a book or watch a movie without actively worrying about being predated so maybe a bird was not the best example, God. (just a joke, please don’t smite me).
You may be reading this and think, hey Dave, you really have not said anything yet, where is the juice! Well, here it is - the concept that I heard from Eastern thought was more or less the fact that the past is just the amalgamation of all the present moments you have had, and the future is the amalgamation of all the present moments you are yet to have. Wow, Dave! So profound! Well, I thought so.
I think especially in some of the psychological principles surrounding trauma and the subconscious mind, it has been “discovered” time and time again that the past events and experiences in one’s life directly contribute to the present moment in ways often unseen or unbeknownst to the conscious mind, and through various techniques like therapy, meditation, or psychedelics, one is able to access these past events and actually address them and then move forward from that moment in time having been “healed” from the lingering effects of those events/experiences.
One of the techniques described from the Eastern perspective was exemplified using a deceased relative who had wronged you in some way. Unfortunately, they are not around in the present moment to mend a relationship or come to peace, and so the recommendation (summarized) was to go back in your mind to the moment in time when the wronging took place, and try to understand, observe, or experience it in a new way in order to come to terms with it in the present moment.
This technique is actually not very far off from a lot of the methods used by therapists today in order to deal with various traumatic experiences from one’s past - such as getting oneself into a hypnotized state or under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. The bottom line was the ability to travel forwards and backward in time through the present moment which is, in the end, all we have.
In this way, we are time-beings, because we only exist at these moments in time and therefore we are time in a way. When I heard that concept laid out, I had to stop myself and take it in. Perhaps it is just because I am a fan of wordplay and this is just a new way of looking at a familiar term, but I actually believe that with all of the other sources that have given me inklings of concepts from different angles, this is the one that finally pushed me over the edge and got me to write and reflect on the idea more formally.