On Perceiving Time

(Photo: ToniVC)

Recently I’ve been wrestling and tussling with trying to perceive time in a better way in the hope of aiding my personal growth. It all came about from reading Scott H Young’s article, “Balancing Today and Tomorrow”, where Scott tackles the age-old problem between personal growth and accepting things as they are. The solution, according to him, is to change from a positional based paradigm to a velocity based paradigm i.e. not to view personal development as reaching from position to position but to view progress as the rate of growth.

To adopt a velocity based paradigm, you have to have a specific way of perceiving time – all that exists is the Present. The Past is only a memory and the Future exists only in your imagination. This then reminded of an idea about goal-setting by Steve Pavlina. In “Personal Development for Smart People”, Steve writes that “the purpose of goal-setting isn’t to control the future…The point of goal-setting is to improve the quality of your present-moment reality.” Then I started thinking, “Do we have control over the future?”

I wrestled with this problem of control for a number of days. I had already worked out that we have no control over the past and we have a lot of control in the present, but I wasn’t so sure about the future. It seemed to me that on some level, we have control over the future, even though it didn’t exist. For example, I can decide that at 10:30pm, I will practise guitar. 10:30pm comes round, and, lo and behold, I am practising guitar. I can control what I do in the future. Well, at least that seemed to be the case. But how could I control something that doesn’t exist? So putting myself on the pro The-Present-All-There-Is side, I thought and thought and thought:

“Ok, if the future doesn’t exist, yet I’m able to control it, then it must be an illusion right?”
“But what about doctor’s appointments? If I have an appointment at eleven, I can wake at ten-thirty, get ready so as not to be late. So it seems I have control there. Ah shit…”
“But what about…nah…ah, fuck it, go sleep.”
“…If I have a doctors appointment at eleven…”

And so it went. I thunk and thunk and thunk. I then hit upon the visualisation of traveling on the red secondhand of my clock. I refined this by imagining myself being strapped to a seat on the secondhand, and thus unable to move. I then visualised a slightly less surreal metaphor where I was in a car at a constant speed of 40mph on a very straight road in an American desert. What I had forgotten to implement in my thought processes was, of course, Time. Specifically, that time exists and the consequences it has on my actions and everything else in my reality.

Time is always moving. And it moves at a constant speed. That much is obvious. But what influence does it have on being able to control the future? So I used my guitar practise example again, as well as the idea of a schedule. What sense would a schedule have if you couldn’t control the future?

Imagine that you have a certain number of things you have to do, and so you create a schedule for the day. You can’t do all of these things at once, so you have to separate each of them out for certain times. You also need a certain amount of time to achieve the required progress for each activity. So you go for a run at 7.30am, get home by 8 to get ready to go to work, leave the house at 8:30 to get to work by 9. So it seems that you have control over what you are going to do next. But the thing is, you only ever experience each of those things in the present moment. You can’t reach work at 8:30 and expect to start working (unless you’re a workaholic) because work begins at 9 (at least the part you’re being paid for). I was beginning to make sense of this whole thing.

Returning back to my car analogy, it’s like there are sign posts on the side of the road proclaiming “MySpace rules! Facebook sucks lol” that need to be thwacked with a hefty baseball bat. You can see the sign up ahead, but you can only hit it when it reaches to you; you can’t hit it any earlier, because your car goes only at 40mph i.e. you have to wait. It was this waiting aspect that made me go “Ahh!”. You can only do those things when it is time to do them, and you need to spend an appropriate amount of time to do them too.

Of course, this doesn’t completely eliminate the position that we have control of the future. For now, being unable to obliterate the competition, I will surrender to the view that we seem to have some control of what we do in the future. It’s the prescience, the predictive ability, being able to see the sign ahead that allows that sense of control. But realise that a) the future doesn’t exist; b) our predictions can be wrong; and c) true control exists in the present. Although you can see ahead, you are welded to the endless march of the secondhand.

In the Flow

picture by kevindooley

I was almost seriously injured by a firework on Sunday. I was busy watching the Federer VS Roddick final until a firework was picked up by my peripheral vision. The screams and the sparks let me know that I was in a precarious situation, so I ran inside. This was a bad decision as I saw the firework chasing me with the sexual insanity of a teenage lad. Eventually, the firework calmed down and all was well. Except that a bunch of newspapers had caught fire. I grabbed the tub from the sink and poured all the water that was in it to put out the fire. As the flames were extinguished, I realised that the ordeal was over.

What does this have to do with flow? What is flow? Here’s a definition from wiki:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

…which is exactly what I experienced. Some terms you may have  heard  describing the condition of flow are: on the ball, in the zone, or in the groove. When I saw the firework I didn’t care whether Federer would win his 15th major or if Andy Roddick could pull something out of the bag. Nor was I thinking if that girl did not call me because of my quirky Facebook message. I knew what I had to do and did it; there was no time, no possibility of thinking about anything else. I was in the Flow.

Flow is fantastic. A lot of mental chatter disappears and productivity goes through the roof. It also feels wonderful. Flow is very important for sportspeople as it allows them to achieve incredible things. I remember a Wimbledon match a few years ago between Kendrick and Nadal. Kendrick was pretty much written off as Nadal was the flavour of the month. However, Nadal got pummeled in the first two sets because Kendrick was playing some amazing tennis. As they say, he was on fire. Unfortunately for Kendrick, Nadal knew that it wouldn’t last and Nadal clawed back one set after the other and beat Kendrick convincingly. For me, it was a great example of flow being able to augment someone’s latent abilities.

Flow can be achieved in pretty much anything. A particularly mundane example was in a previous job: I had to take clothing from the fitting rooms and put them back out on the shop floor. I found that grabbing an immense pile of clothing and finding where each piece lived was oddly engrossing. I also found that by taking this duty my work day would pass much faster as I would lose my sense of time. I find that I can achieve this state through reading, watching a film/television programme, singing, and, most recently, writing. I find that I can’t do this with piano playing, which is probably why I’m not that great at it.

So how do you go about achieving this state of flow? For me, it is very much related to what I like to do, such as the things listed above. You first need to start the activity and then continue it for a while before you enter the flow. You also need limited distractions, as it can be quite difficult to enter the flow once you’ve left it. It also helps, if you’re doing a creative activity, to be non-judgemental towards your initial steps, as criticism kills the flow and does not allow you to be creative in your solutions. Once you’re there, relish it and keep on going! Amazing things can happen but you have to allow it to happen and let it be.

Flow is related to many things: creativity, art, lateral thinking, meditation, being present, problem solving, focus, joy. All these things are related to each other. For example, lateral thinking is thought of as “thinking outside the box” and is very much related to problem solving because some problems cannot not be solved at the same level of thinking the problem is at. Problem solving is related to creativity as you will often need to think of a different, novel way in order to solve a particularly sticky problem. And so on. My personal favourites are being present and joy. Being present, as I hinted above, removes a lot of mental chatter and you are in the moment; you are not regretting the past nor are you worrying about the future. All that exists is the present. Partly because of this lack of stress, it is a joyful, wonderful state to be in. It’s magical.

I urge you, dearest reader of this article, to achieve this state of flow more often. It is a more natural way of being. It reduces stress, especially about the things that you cannot even hope to control. Your productivity will increase, you will become more creative, you will be more happier – there’s no excuse not to try it.