Maybe this is just a motif of adulthood, but time, particularly the lack of it, has come up a lot post-college. It seems to play a role in everything.
“Go hard now because you won’t have time when you’re older / Is doing ‘X’ really worth the time / Don’t dwell on the past, always move forward / Life is what you spend your time doing / Time is the one thing that you can never get back / etc…”
All of these rushing thoughts belie an insecurity about time. Time is the most sacred resource, one that, tragically and indubitably, will finish. But is time something that actually runs out? I believe our perception of time as scarce stems from this idea that time is linear, that it only moves forward never backwards. The feeling of scarcity then permeates all these facets of our lives because we measure ourselves through time’s passage. The clock starts ticking when we are born. We expect to grow and improve as the years pass. And rarely, do we think of think of the time beyond our deaths.
I think an anxious perspective of time can cause undue stress and lead us to make somewhat inauthentic and unfulfilling decisions. I’ve experienced plenty of pressure from time, so for this essay I dug into different perspectives on our continuous flow of moments. My hope is that this newsletter teaches me to have a chiller relationship with time, and perhaps that it helps you too!
Ñaupa & Circular Time
When I first began studying for the research project in Ecuador that changed my life, I watched this highly informative video by Kichwan (Andean indigenous tribe) scholar Xavier Hurtado.
Xavier Hurtado introduces us to sumak kawsay (good living), the philosophical compass that practicing Kichwa centered their lives around for more than a thousand years. To realize sumak kawsay, aka lead a “good life in nature”, one must maintain balance amongst, what the Kichwa define as, the four pillars of fulfillment:
Ruray - Productivity | Yachay - Learning | Munay - Spirituality | Atiy - Community
Sumak Kawsay is not something that you achieve by “growing up”. Rather, to the Kichwa, sumak kawsay is a pull towards our human nature, and therefore accessible to someone at any stage of their life. Sumak kawsay looks differently for each person at each stage of their life, but the Kichwa believe that these four tenets will always remain essential for human flourishing. This centripetal notion of life - change revolving around core elements - is also reflected in the Kichwan representation of time, called Ñaupa.
Hurtado and the Kichwa believe that as time projects the future, it also reflects on the past, hence the spherical helix shape of Ñaupa. In other words, though life and the world may appear to change, we are revolving around a familiar story.
I had a conversation with a Kichwan elder that taught me more about Ñaupa and the patience that comes with it. Because Kichwan lifestyle is deeply rooted in predicting the climate, I asked him, “Are you worried that climate change will eradicate your way of life?” He responded with a parable and some sobering words. I paraphrase:
The challenges of today are not new. The story of humanity vacillates between two states: Oscuridad (darkness, blind) y Luz (light, awareness). Humanity in darkness slowly loses touch with the spirits, with Mother Earth (Pachmama), and ultimately with themselves. Humanity right now is deep in oscuridad. But, as always, we will return to luz. The changing of the climate is Pachmama’s way of reminding us what we have forgot. So, even if we (the Kichwa) die, the knowledge will one day come back, and we will not truly be gone.
“Revolving around a familiar story” has been a powerful theme for me recently. I hit one year in Philly this August/September and I have been deep in nostalgia. My past few weeks featured a "looking back to see forward" tour of sorts. I visited old friends in their new homes. I touched base with old flames. I even bought my first house, which ended up being the home I spent ages 5-14. All of this gave me a kind of inexplicable feeling that the past is both incredibly close and far away. I don’t know…it is not quite clear to me what “familiar story” my life is circling around, but I have become more convinced that there is one. And that both grounds me and gives me peace.
Me chilling outside the house that I would one day buy
Talk About Time
Linguistic determinism is the idea that language limits and determines human thought, as well as other orders of thinking like categorization, memory, and perception. Strict linguistic determinants believe that people who speak languages that are structurally dissimilar, effectually, experience the world differently, too.
Gabriel Luis Bourdin studies the linguistics of Kichwa in their discourse around time in his “En los tiempos de ñaupa: El cuerpo y la deixis temporal en lenguas originarias de sudamérica” to posit the deterministic effects their language has on their reality. First, Bourdin offers a parallel to Romance languages, the dominant languages of modernity. He writes:
“Modern culture favors the conventional picture of a linear time, where the speaker (ego) is represented as facing to the future. The past is behind at his back. The semantic theory of “conceptual metaphors” claims that such correspondence between the front-behind axis of the body and the divisions of time is due to natural and universal principles, as we usually look and move forward. From this perspective, the future is the goal toward which we are moving. This is consistent with an ideological propensity, based on the idea of unlimited progress, which gives primacy to the notion of “going forward.”
Bourdin argues that modern Romance languages tend to think about time in the context of the individual’s body. Bourdin conjectures that there are various implications of locating time on an axis of the body. For example, he connects our society’s valorization of sight and forward movement with our similar worship of future and progress. Perhaps, this is how the modern idea that our future is progressively better than our past stubbornly lodges itself into our social psyche (#its2019). However, Bourdin’s main point is that this linguistic deictic contributes to the subconscious effect of believing time is something that happens to you. For example, we say things like "the past is behind you" or "the future lies ahead". It is a result of various ego-dependent expressions of time that time slowly becomes such a personal matter.
Another example of ego-dependent vs ego-independent reference to time is as follows: an ego-dependent claim would be “New Year’s is getting closer [to us]” and ego-independent would be “It is almost New Year’s.” In ego-independency, New Years is the fixed event and the individual is the variable. Bourdin further explains, “the ego-less conception of the future reveals that the observer of time does not see themselves inside time, like a river, but rather sees it as something outside.”
Bourdin’s research points out that the Kichwan language boasts many locutions of time that are independent of the individual. The Kichwa talk often with circularity. For example, Ñaupa means both in front and behind, and the Kichwa use the same word to describe deceased ancestors and unborn future generations.
Kichwa is not the only old language like this. In Bengali, we use the same word 'Khalke' to say 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. Similarly, though one has distinctive words for parents, grandparents and grandchildren call one another the same words for siblings (bhaiya-brother, appu-sister).
Even something as seemingly natural and universal as the perception of time can be put on its head and challenged when compared to other cultures. I love the diversity of our world; it really opens me to the complexity and ambiguity of this mosaic called human life. I particularly loved learning about how much our egos and our perception of time can be related. The Zen-boy in me finds calm in perceiving time and generations circularly as opposed to linearly. In circle-time, there is no ultimate salvation or perfection that we are moving towards. Rather, we are simply the new siblings of our grandparents.
Time is a … Cube?
Einstein, upon the death of his friend & colleague Michele Besso, penned a letter to his pal’s family. In it he wrote, “now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Einstein’s position is part-therapeutic, part-scientific. Einstein’s conception of the universe, referred to as the block universe model, argues that the laws that underlie the General Theory of Relativity and Standard Model of Particle Physics are time-symmetric, that is the physics they describe are the same regardless of whether the variable ‘time’ increases or decreases.
[Block Universe Model. The Model is hotly contested, but it is the most accepted by physicists]
In the block universe model, all of time exists in three-dimensional space, and heretofore, all of time is happening now. Since we are always located wherever we are, everyone is located in their present. If, for instance, you travel to the past, then you are simply in someone else’s present. Einstein’s block universe model poses the experience of time’s passage as subjective, not an objective state of the universe.
It’s tricky to conceptualize that all of time is already happening, but I think one movie does a great job at taking a stab at it. This movie also happens to be a favorite ;).
Mr. Nobody is one of those movies that can change your life. Mr. Nobody’s central thesis is that our lives unfold far differently than we can ever predict. It offers a beautiful meditation on both the significance and insignificance of decisions. Whenever I feel regret lurking I think back to this flick. Mr. Nobody tells its story by blending distinct time periods of the titular character out of order until addressing the singularity of time with one of the most spectacular film climaxes I’ve seen. It’s a treat.
The Golden Years
Why does early adulthood have to be the only time period where we hustle, chase our dreams, and make a name for ourselves? Let’s be honest, we live in an ageist society. I often hear my 20s described as the time where I can take risks and discover myself, but I better figure my sh*t out once I’m getting to 30. And ominously, my friends who are in their 30s lament to me about how opportunity starts to dwindle in career, love, etc. There is certainly a structural component in our society that systematically makes the world more rigid for people as they age and, as human life gets longer in wealthy countries, we should strive to change that.
One myth tied to this ageism is that we lose energy as we get older. In his article, “Old age is made up - and this concept is hurting everyone,” Joseph Coughlin reviews medical history to demonstrate how since-debunked science from the early 19th century spurred a popular belief that people ran out of ‘vital energy’ as they grew older. Coughlin examines the still-developing research around energy and old age, making an interesting point about how lifestyle, not age, correlates more to one’s energy levels. For some real-life evidence, peep this article about a co-working space reserved exclusively for people 65 and up! And, lest we forget, Bernie, Biden, Trump and Warren are all in their 70s and campaigning for the presidency.
Deadlines
There is no right way to think about time. I focused this piece on non-linearity because it’s the perspective that we don’t often hear about. But, linear and non-linear perceptions of time each have their own advantages. In this TedTalk, Devdutt Pattanaik, a Chief Belief Officer (real title of a billion-dollar company lol), balances the importance of the two perspectives with a story about Alexander the Great (linear time) and a gymnosophist (circular time) in the first 10 minutes of this TedTalk.
Though there is no right way to approach time, this newsletter gave me a better insight on deadlines. I am primarily thinking about personal deadlines, but the logic could easily carry over to work and projects, too. Like Mr. Nobody taught me, events unfold in unpredictable ways, and it is unrealistic to believe that rushing to reach something, like finding a new job by October or getting a ring by spring, will be the best outcome in the long-run.
And, rushing, rooted in a scarce perspective of time, can lend itself to sacrificing a pillar of sumak kawsay for the goal. Focusing on one pillar of fulfillment, like productivity, in order to get it done raises some other questions, like: if I sacrifice other key areas of fulfillment in my life for the pursuit of a goal, why is my future self’s time prioritized over my current self? or can a pillar ever fully be satiated? The beauty of sumak kawsay is that it is a description of fulfilled human nature at all stages of life; there is never a time where one pillar no longer needs to practiced. The centering aspect of sumak kawsay is helpful as I try to channel a lifestyle driven by principles over a lifestyle driven by achievement.
And, why the rush? I will still have access to the same 24 hours I have today in 20, 30 years. If a dream is in the cards, it can still happen, even when I am 70 like a few of our presidential candidates or those retiree entrepreneurs.
Finally, harkening back to the linguistics, the word ‘deadline’ reeks of a linear ego-centric perspective on time. It literally has the word line in it. Plus, the word ‘deadline’ reinforces the notion of death (loss/termination) once a point in time has been reached, shooting us back to an anxious relationship with time.
I used to put the mindset of “treat everyday like its your last” on a pedestal. But, I think I took it too far by vigorously chasing my ambitions and living life in a whirlwind. I’m transitioning to a fused perspective that features a circular, time-secure, long-term perspective that operates as if I will live forever! Each day could be my last and I want to live it as fully as possible, but I am never running out of time. Time abounds and abounds!
If my musings don’t make much sense, I’ll leave you with some words from Gary V, who puts what I’m trying to say quite succinctly.