Where do you live in the time continuum? Do you think a lot about future plans, upcoming vacations, upcoming events, weddings, graduations, promotions, etc.? Or are you at a place or moment in your life where you often think about the past, things that happened, things that happened, good or not so good?
In Discovery Free will and personal liability, Noted humanistic psychologist Joseph Richlak (1928-2013) recognized that recalling pleasant memories is normal and can sometimes be psychologically beneficial. However, he points out that most psychologists agree that living in the past is unhealthy. Richlak believed that the fundamental nature of humans is to look to the future, “we always create ourselves by arranging future situations or letting them arrange us.”
How our relationship with time develops depends in part on culture. In the United States, we live on “clock time.” If we get dinner at 7:00 p.m., we’ll arrive around that time. However, some countries are “in relationship time”. For example, a Brazilian doctor once told me that he never arrives at someone’s house in time for dinner. This is considered rude. A few hours would be fine. If you’ve traveled the world, you’ve probably experienced these differences in how you perceive time in everyday life.
Where we live in time is as subjective as time itself. What exactly is time? The answer depends on who is asked. Different disciplines and fields within disciplines often see time very differently. Some philosophers may question whether time is real or an illusion, while some physicists may see it as a dimension of our physical reality, one dimension of spacetime. Years ago, Paul Brockelman wrote about the inherent, pervasive, and fundamental nature of time. Time shapes our experiences, but “we cannot taste it, see it, smell it, hear it, or touch it.” Nevertheless, we perceive ourselves in the temporal structure of past-present-future. As Ronald Purser has noted, “our realm of experience appears to take place within a perfectly bounded and linear time frame, where events occur in predictable sequential order, moving steadily from past to present to future.”
Richlak described us as living on the permanent edge of the present, moving into the future. He distinguished between short-term futures and long-term futures. He said that we can be so invested in creating or planning for our long-term future that we fail to experience the short-term future—that we cannot appreciate the afternoon, the evening, the next day, or enjoy our partner, our children, etc., or experience a sunset or a starry night. Don’t give meaning to the present and live in the present moment.
Cardaciotto and colleagues defined present moment awareness as “constant monitoring of experience, focusing on present experience rather than preoccupation with past or future events.” At present, awareness is associated with the improvement of well-being, decrease worryand other positive psychological benefits. Richlak would agree. He suggested that many of us live in the present (or the short-term future) during “times of rest”—vacations, special evenings, making love, meditating, exercising, etc. He concluded: “The secret of living happily is the realization of the present life.” en route“.
To maximize our potential, we need to understand not only how we use our time, but how our use of time affects who we become.
