The Currency of Time

Quite often I find myself pondering on how we perceive time in its various forms, and how we understand the 'currency of time'. Rather as with money, this fuller understanding of time as a 'currency' helps us spend it with more wisdom.

The Inner and Outer temporal worlds

Time is a very spacey concept and I believe that the more ways of looking at time we give ourselves when we are young, the greater the understanding we have of how (a) we fit into time outside of ourselves, (b) we can manipulate our perception of time within ourselves and (c) how time intervals have a bearing upon our sequenced thoughts and actions.

Like most things, we first come to getting an understanding about time from our parents and older siblings. Through this understanding and multi-modelling process, we form our own perceptions of time and how we run our lives relative to the past-present-future continuum, time intervals and sequenced thoughts and actions.

The Importance of Now

Recently I was coaching a group of young players all aged 10 and under - and at the end of the session, after a very exciting game, they all sat down and I just recapped what we'd been doing, and how they'd all fared etc. Finally we went into a short 'Q & A' to finish the session.
This is usually where the children ask questions ranging from something we've just been doing to just about anything else. Its all conducted on a very quick and snappy basis by them and me, and its a good way to spend 60 seconds or so of final interaction. Often interesting remarks bubble up to the surface, and this time was no exception.
"What Time is it?" asked someone, and as I glanced at my watch I couldn't resist responding with the famous quote from Yogi Berra, "You mean NOW?"
Curiously, a level of quiet fell over the group, and it was one of those occasions when you always wished that the 'cameras are rolling'. I grasped the opportunity and continued: "The Time is Now," I said. "On my watch its always Now. Yesterday, or earlier, has gone. You don't ask someone 'what time is it ten minutes ago' do you? No you ask about Now. Tomorrow, or later, has yet to arrive. When it does get here it will be Now. Only Now is right Now, here and now. And Now," I said very slowly, "is the only place to Be." It was literally one of those timeless moments, as I could almost hear the words landing in their collective unconscious.
It certainly wasn't quite like this scene from the movie SPACEBALLS -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNIwlRClHsQ

For most people, time is a real and almost tangible thing. Amusing as this graph is intended to be, it illustrates very well how we unconsciously 'bend' time, how the currency of time has a different value depending on whichever "land of the Now" we are residing in.

Controlling Our 'Tide of Time'

I've written elsewhere about how we each make up our 'world' - our own individual realities - and I call it the 'Reality Building'. Within this 'Building' are 3 vast temporal rooms or 'Halls': Memory, Now and Future. We see and run our lives in these Halls, and generally we move in and through these Halls in a fluid, flowing way. A lot of the time though we just get carried along by "the tide", without realising that "the tide" is something WE CONTROL, not something we are CONTROLLED BY.

Whether we are 'living in the past', or putting off our lives for something in the future (the "I'll be happy when..." people) - we always feel that the tide has taken us into that particular Hall. Whereas the reality is that it is OUR TIDE - and we choose where it goes and how it goes.

The Impatient Client

I once had a session with a client who "wanted help with time". Sadly, she never allowed our discussion to get beyond the pre-requisite of her telling me what HER perception of 'time' was. As I asked her various questions to elicit the information she stormed out of the session saying, "All you do is ask questions - this is a complete waste of time." Ironically, if she'd seen a video of herself doing this - then she'd have got all the answers and help she needed. I did think that if she came back I'd ask her one more question -

"When you come to a road and, given that you want to get to the other side, you can do one of a number of things - just walk across without looking, look to see if there's any traffic, ask someone to help you across, or you could stay where you are. So, which do you want to do?"