There are different ways to think about time and different ways to think in terms of time. These constitute what might be called one’s time perspective or perspectives.

Flickr photo by Myphotosshare

Time Perspective

Let’s look at an example, and play around with how you think about the time you have left in life. Here is a simple mental experiment to try, which might make you feel a bit more immortal.

We’re going to change the time perspective from which you see life. Instead of thinking that your life is seventy or eighty years long, consider it as being composed of 36 to 42 million minutes. Make this more than an intellectual exercise though. Sit still (turn away from the screen and stop reading this in a moment), breath deeply, and quietly observe your life and everything going on around you for an entire minute while simultaneously thinking about just how long that minute is. Do this now.

Now that you’ve done this mindfulness exercise for sixty seconds, think about how many tens of millions of these minutes you may have left. Doesn’t that make it seem like life lasts a long time?

The thought that life is 36 to 42 million minutes in life versus 70 or 80 years changes one’s mind a bit. But the exercise in observation makes it a much more significant change of perspective. This is in part because when we are conscious of the moment time feels like it is going more slowly. When we are lost in the repetitive patterns of our daily existence–both existentially and internally–time flies by as it does during sleep. Perhaps this is because in a sense we are asleep.

Here are two questions to consider;

1. Does consciously cultivating a different time perspective actually change the way you think about things, and in what ways?

2. Can you purposely maintain a different perspective, or does your mind always slip back to its original way of seeing things?

I have one more example of how we can change our experience by changing the way we think in terms of time. At a young age (around nine or ten as I recall) I discovered that if something bad happened to me, I could reduce the bad feelings. All I had to do was imagine what had just happened as though I was remembering it several years later. Immediately the power of the negativity was diminished. In general, when we are “in the moment” we experience things as more real, and when our mind is “somewhere else” in time our current experience is muted. As my childhood experiment showed, we can choose where in time to think from. In other words we can see (and therefore feel) from a different time perspective.