Essay: The Flexibility of Time.
5 ways to bend it.
Good morning. T minus two weeks until my presentation at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering and I’m in beast mode. That’s why this newsletter is late. Sorry. But also maybe because I went to Reel Rock 19’s premiere last week and it was certified insane. My friend who sat next to me told me he’d never seen anyone nod ‘no’ so much during a film. The film in question was Riders On The Storm by Belgians Siebe Vanhee, Sean Villanueva O’driscoll and Nico Favresse. Highly recommend just for this one line alone: you think the summit you’re trying to reach is on top of this rock, but it’s actually the summit inside of you.
A lingering thought since these films has been that the featured climbers didn’t blink an eye in taking years, sometimes decades, to finally send one route. They try over and over again, with batches of attempts often years apart. Their cherry-picked ascents are glued to their mind’s eye as they move through daily life. Not frustratedly focused on when they’ll reach the summit though, but humbly working on becoming the kind of climber for whom reaching the summit is inevitable. From their perspective, time is not the enemy – it’s the key ingredient to mastery.
And – although true – their stories aren’t so much about battling through the journey, embracing faced obstacles as fated guidance, or thinking that the roughest paths bring the brightest views. It’s about realising that the destination is not the summit – it’s who the climber had to become in order to reach it. This is what it means to reach the summit inside of you.
It strongly reminded me of some of the most mind-altering books I’ve read over the past years, like Power of Now, Untethered Soul, Courage to be Disliked, anything by Jung, Illusions, Psycho-cybernetics etc. that all have one objective in common: completely shatter your most deep-seated assumptions on the passage of time.
From my humble experience, the ability to bend my subjective experience of time has felt like a private breeze on a collectively sweltering day. The break I never knew existed but always needed. A supernatural skill in an otherwise mortal life. Because our subjective experience of anything is how we experience everything: stress is only as unhealthy as your brain thinks it is, smartphone use is only bad for your mental health when you feel it is, and getting older is only frail when you act like it. If you want to get scientific – this phenomenon is called cognitive reappraisal. When your mind’s perception of time changes, you will physically experience time differently. And the way you feel about time is exactly how you’ll experience its passing between now and reaching your summit.
5 ways to bend your experience of time:
Where does the present moment go after it’s over, does it recede into the past or does it push into the future?
Thinking of the ‘now’ as a still frame. When this ‘now’ is over, does it recede to join the frames of the past, or does it inform the first frame of the future? Is the ‘now’ a fleeting moment that will soon be ‘gone’, or does it lay the groundwork for your next ‘now’ like a blueprint? They are both right at the same time, but your brain picks one over the other as a time model. Can you switch between the two? And how does that impact your decisions?
Do you move through time, or, does time move through you?
We rush through life, thinking we are the ones that move from yesterday to today, to tomorrow. We must run, nearly physically, pull or push forwards to get there. To reach our goals in time. Because we think we live on top of a fixed invisible timeline. But what if we were to stand completely still? Time would still move. Tomorrow would still come. It would come towards us. So instead of seeing yourself as a movable pawn on a fixed timeline of life, imagine yourself as fixed in the now, with time moving through you. What happens when you tell your brain: just be here, be still, perform your duty in this moment, in this place, and let time move through us. It always will.
Do you experience the passage of life through your own eyes or from a bird’s-eye view?
