non-linearity of time breakthrough
19 Mar 2019i had a breakthrough this past saturday/sunday about the non-linearity of time!
for so long i feel like i have been at the edges of the understanding of that statement. i felt like i almost understood it and then it would slip away. and i have thought a lot about it. i think about time travel pretty often (definitely inspired by alexis pauline gumbs and prentiss hemphill and octavia butler and others) and i also think about flow a lot, too.
but on saturday night i watched this dance video something like 20 times. the video is a minute long so, in essence, i watched the same 59 seconds for 20 minutes. and yet, as i was doing it, i was so totally enthralled in the watching that i had no notion of how much linear time was passing.
on sunday, as i put the link to the video into my newsletter prep document, i was reflecting on that experience. and then it just sort of hit me: being in flow is literally stepping outside the flow of regular, linear time.
:O
it’s so simple and yet so profound. it’s about flow.
when in flow, one’s sense of time changes. when in flow, you lose your sense of time. an hour fly by OR it can feel like forever. most of us have experiences like this: getting lost in a book, summer camp afternoons filled with a game that is so entralling you are shocked when it’s time to go in for snack, practicing or playing or listening to music, dancing, etc. and it’s those experiences, those moments that allow all of us to have access to non-linear time!
obviously, we’ll all still die. but the more we/i can prioritize and make space for flow, the more non-linear time we/i will experience.
i knew flow was important and i’ve written a bit about it. but i don’t think i saw how important it was until now.
and it makes me think about time as a construct designed to relate to production. and how, before linear time was created, before work shifts, before measurement of outputs, maybe people just lived in flow a lot more. and then had a lot “longer” lives…
hm!
maybe…
words / writing / post-processing
368w / 11min / 6min