6:25 am Friday morning
I have a webcall at 7am. I just set a timer for 30 minutes.
Now I have timers on my phone. From the olden days, I have a small collection of vintage mechanical timers, sand timers, egg timers, wind-up timers from my lifelong engagement with getting to things, as the saying goes, on time.
When I'm engaged with this writing, when I'm talking to you, when I'm thinking about you, when I'm driving, swimming, walking, I don't feel time passing. When I'm in a meeting or leading a meeting, I don't feel time passing.
Of our two processors that manage information for us, only one tracks time. When we're engaging our Associative process, it holds us in the present so we can be fully alert to what's happening in our surroundings. It's our rapid-thinking process. It allows us to be fully present to opportunities and threats. It's experiencing and remembering events. It knows if an event was big or small. It doesn't track the measure of how long it was.
Most of you can remember experiences of joy or danger when you thought: what happened to the time? Sometimes, time moved in slow motion, sometimes time seemed to have passed too quickly. One of my favorite passages in the Odyssey -- I recommend Emily Wilson's translation -- comes when Odysseus and Penelope meet after twenty years of travail and separation. For their first night together, shining-eyed Athena "held the night back, restraining golden Dawn beside the Ocean."
Blessed art thou if that's ever happened for you.
The Sequential process keeps the tick tick of our temporal clock. Among many others, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a professor in developmental and cognitive psychology at Université Clermont Auvergne, France, has studied this phenomenon in a deep and multidisciplinary way. As with everything to do with our minds -- which encompass more than our brains -- it's complex and multidimensional. At the same time, our brain's time-keeping mechanism appears to function as a set of coordinated metronomes making the tik tok.
This phenomenon allows us to know: what is ten minutes? Can I respond to this email, complete this phone call, get to the break room and back? What is an hour? What out of all these things that have my attention, what can I meaningly move forward in the next hour. The tik tok helps support our allocation of that precious resource called time. It got you to that plane you may be on right now, and it may have helped you make strategic decisions about lingering over a problem presented on a timed test.
Most of us can access both. We can be fully present in the moment for some of our consciousness, and we can be focused, steady, and time considerate for another type of consciousness.
All of us however, have a preferential state of time engagement. Those differences show up like this. When we ask someone Sequential preferent a question like, how long is your daily commute? We get answers like: "Twenty-nine minutes today, and twenty-eight minutes yesterday. When we ask someone Associative preferent the same question, we get answers like: "About a half an hour," because it's a half an hour sized event. They're not tracking whether it was twenty-four minutes or thirty-six minutes.
I don't feel time passing at all. When I make an appointment for a webcall, I set reminders for 24-hours ahead - I easily lose track of what day it is -- reminders for two-hours ahead, and reminders for fifteen minutes ahead. After the two hour mark, I sent a countdown clock for five minutes before the call, because if I get caught up in something in the fifteen minutes between the last reminder and the call, I can forget the call.
Paradoxically, I haven't regularly worn a watch in my adult life. Having a watch makes me too anxious about time. I keep getting knocked out of present awareness and spend too much time nervously checking it. I don't remember how much time passed since I last looked at it. I set timers and spend my time not thinking about time.
Many people would call my condition a disability or disorder. I've heard, Time Blindness, and most commonly, ADHD. No doubt there are other diagnoses.
I call it an exceptional ability to stay present in the moment for you, and you, and you. Once I learned to manage it by outsourcing the measurement of time passing, I experience it as a gift.
Next up: engaging others when we experience time differently.
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Sylvie Droit-Volet: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-fluidity-of-time