Musings on Time

The bizarre times and national leadership we are seeing often makes me think of Orwell’s 1984 of late, but that surreality, as well as other pressing topics I’m focussed on, are for another day.

Today I simply quote that famous opening line and move on to musing about Time. I am and always have been fascinated by Time. Sometimes it seems to go so fast, sometimes so slowly, sometimes we feel we can see into the future, sometimes we have a vivid recollection of the past.

My focus on Time also links to my work. When I’m present with a client time often feels like it stops as I listen deeply, whilst I am also always paying close attention to the timeframe the client is focussed on. Short term or Long? Tactical or Strategic? How far ahead is their Vision?

So, yes, time is always an area of fascination and focus for me, but over the period of the lockdown (I’m currently in week 12 of solo isolation as I write this!), I am finding time ever more fascinating. The lockdown is both dragging on endlessly and also flying past. Each day, each week, each month are both passing slowly and fast.

Being more, Doing Less

Now, in my work with leaders I often encourage them to “be” leaders, not to “do” leadership, to “do” less, be less “busy” and instead to focus more on their own balance, their presence, their energy. To one leader I recall sharing with them “the less you DO, the more valuable you can BE”.

Years ago, though, a mentor pointed out to me something I wasn’t seeing, that whilst I was encouraging and guiding my clients in this way, I myself was still “doing” too much, being oh so busy with so many clients filling my diary.

Well, in recent years I have started to practice what I preach, to “do” less, so as to “be” more, hence I balance my time with clients with other pursuits such as writing daily on this blog, on having many conversations to support people in many different areas of work and life, plus to read and learn voraciously. Out of all of this, my writing can be eclectic and varied, all of it around what I refer to as OpenLeadership.

Perhaps by “doing” less, I have more space and, yes, time, to be. I thank you for humouring my musings on Time, and today am sharing with you a short passage from a podcast I listened to while out for a walk yesterday. An absolutely fascinating snippet which really struck me about how we humans experience time.

This comes from a podcast called Risky Conversations, always fascinating conversations with deep thinkers. The episode is “Ep.301 Time Dilation and the Mind”, with the incredible Iain McGilchrist, author of “The Master and his Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”, a book I am currently listening to on my many walks through lockdown on audiobook. At around 51 minutes into the podcast, Iain is asked a question sent in by a mutual friend, the polymathic Mike Driver:

“Does the right hemisphere reside outside of time? If the answer is yes, then what is time? s there only one time and it is now?”

Deep! Iain answered:

I’ve thought about this a great deal and actually what physicists say, well they often contradict one another!, but I think there’s a consensus that time is actually not an illusion, it’s the one thing that is not an illusion, and I’ve come to the conclusion that that is probably right, and it’s also true in all the wisdom literature, including oriental, Buddhist, Taoist literature, that the flow of time is real. It’s the one thing that is real. However, if you are in tune with the flow of time in a sense it ceases to exist. I mean it’s still there, but the thing is that you are not somehow being passed by it or passing it by.

It’s a bit like if you stand on the bank of a stream and watch the river going by then you can see certainly the flowing of time, but if you were so perfectly in the water and floating with it and not striving at all, you would be buoyed along by the water in the sense that, relative to the water, you really weren’t moving, so for you the thing was present all the time, you were in the present all the time.

So I think it’s possible to be in the present, as many mystical traditions enjoin on us, without abolishing time.

The bold highlights are mine, and after listening to them twice then transcribing them, then writing this, time for me to go for another walk in nature to simply walk with those thoughts.

if you are in tune with the flow of time in a sense it ceases to exist

I think it’s possible to be in the present, as many mystical traditions enjoin on us, without abolishing time.

Thank you for being with me on my musings today.