Notre Dame with flying buttresses - photo by scaredsqueeA friend and Yoga teacher Gary Carter once told me a story. He had been in a class where they were practising the lotus posture in a headstand. The woman next to him kept falling out of the posture and giggling, then getting back up giving it another go and ….. not quite making it. Somewhere between giggling and picking herself up the floor she would say to ‘another five years’.
She was about 80 at the time.
Our perception of time can make a huge difference to what we do and what we achieve. The question is, what is a long period of time for you?
Probably that depends on the context. Arriving at the post office, seeing a line of slow moving people can make five minutes seem looooong. Arriving at an office with a full task list to be completed for a much loved, and rapidly approaching project can make eight hours seem short. Our perception of time can vary immensely.
The significance of an event shifts with the passing of time. What makes us cringe with embarrassment one day, when remembered several years later becomes trivial or funny. Some day you’ll look back at this and laugh…why wait?
Culturally we have a tendency to look at our projects in terms of years, and rarely more than one generation. Compare that to the people building cathedrals. Down the road from me is Notre Dame, which took 185 years to build, or approximately six generations of labourers and craftsmen.
Our perception of time can make a huge difference to what we do and what we achieve. The question is, what is a long period of time for you?
Probably that depends on the context. Arriving at the post office, seeing a line of slow moving people can make five minutes seem looooong. Arriving at an office with a full task list to be completed for a much loved, and rapidly approaching project can make eight hours seem short. Our perception of time can vary immensely.
The significance of an event shifts with the passing of time. What makes us cringe with embarrassment one day, when remembered several years later becomes trivial or funny. Some day you’ll look back at this and laugh…why wait?
Culturally we have a tendency to look at our projects in terms of years, and rarely more than one generation. Compare that to the people building cathedrals. Down the road from me is Notre Dame, which took 185 years to build, or approximately six generations of labourers and craftsmen.
Lord John Brown re-branded BP from British Petroleum to beyond Petroleum on the basis of the question 'What will BP be doing 100 years from now?'. Petrol was not part of the answer.
Recently I read a book written about a Native American who complained ‘The white man’s culture steals from his grandchildren to give to his children.’ Which is an interesting statement from an NLP point of view. It acknowledges the positive intention – being a good parent, without condoning the shortsighted nature of the behaviour.
As someone interested in Sustainable development, based on a fascination with biology it is easy for me to have a sense of inevitable planetary doom. For all the changes of heart and environmental initiatives, it may be too late for us. We may well have upset the balance of the planet enough that we will wipe ourselves out, and many, many other species at the same time. We may be in the space between pulling the trigger and the bullet arriving.
However, even if we wipe ourselves out, even if we destroy every complex eco-system on the planet, in a few tens of million years life will have built itself up to a new flowering of diversity.
Sometimes when my daughter draws on a chalkboard, or her etch-a-sketch she cries if someone wipes out her pictures. Mostly she erases them gleefully, and gets to work on the next one.
In that perspective global extinction is just the planet getting ready for some more drawings.
But how can we apply these philosophical ramblings, apart from having some comfort in the face of inevitable loss?
All these perspectives, from five seconds, to five billion years are perceived in the present instant of our subjectivity. The problems start when we get stuck in an inappropriate perspective. Either too long - 'well all I do is ultimately insignificant in the vast expanse of time.' Or alternatively too short 'just one more beer...'
Or thinking a five year project is a failure because of the events of a single week.
There could be situations in which those events definitively kill the project, but given the greater space that perspective over years offers can turn the sense of the unfortunate events into a learning experience, rather than a defeat.
To practise flexibility in time perspective, you can deliberately exercise it in relation to decisions. I'll write it as a step by step exercise, but once you get the principles practise it as you like.
1. Think of a particular project or decision.
2. What will your perspective on it be in one week year, in five years, in ten years, by the end of your life, in one generation, in three generations, in the proverbial seven generations.
3. What about from a perspective of millions of years.
4. Consider these different perspectives. Do they give you new information, or a different sense of the project/decision? How does the decision/project match with your values or sense of life mission?
Can you get a sense of balance between the different perspectives?
5. Returning to the present moment, what seems right to you now?
It seems paradoxical, but taking these multiple perspectives regularly helps me stay more present. It helps me be more present, but not necessarily in an opportunistic ‘live for the moment' sense.
Rather present to enjoy the moment. The sun shining in through the window and illuminating my hands on the keyboard, the ache in my back, and a sense of openness in my chest that is warmed by the same sun that falls on my hands.
So wherever you are present reading this now, ask yourself if there is some perspective of time that you have been ignoring. Taking that into consideration, what is important to you now?
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