Where do you live in the continuum of time? Do you think a lot about future plans, vacations to come, future events, weddings, graduations, promotions, and so forth? Or are you at a place or moment in your life when you think more often of the past, things that happened, events that were good or not so good?
In Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, the renowned humanistic psychologist Joseph Rychlak (1928-2013) acknowledged that reminiscing about pleasant memories is normal and sometimes can even be psychologically helpful. However, he noted that most psychologists agree that living in the past is unhealthy. Rychlak believed that the essential nature of people was looking to the future, that “we always create ourselves by arranging future circumstances or allowing them to arrange us.”
How our relationship with time unfolds depends in part on culture. In the United States, we live on “clock time.” If we have a dinner engagement at 7 p.m., we will arrive close to that time. Some countries, however, are on “relational time.” For example, a Brazilian physician told me once he would never arrive at someone’s home for dinner on time. It would be considered rude. Within a couple of hours would be fine. If you have traveled the world, you have probably experienced these differences in how time is perceived in daily life.
Where we live in time, like time itself, is subjective. What is time actually? 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 whereas some physicists may see it as a dimension of our physical reality, one of the dimensions of spacetime. Years ago, Paul Brockelman wrote about the peculiar, pervasive, and fundamental nature of time. Time shapes our experiences yet “we cannot taste it, see it, smell it, hear it or touch it.” Yet we perceive ourselves in a past-present-future temporal structure. As stated by Ronald Purser, “our realm of experience then appears to be completely confined to, and happen within, the realm of linear time, where events unfold in a predictable sequential order, moving inexorably forward from the past, to the present, and into the future.”
Rychlak described us as living on the ever-flowing edge of the present as it moves into the future. He differentiated between short-term futures and long-range futures. He suggested we can become invested so heavily in creating or planning for our long-term futures that we fail to experience short-term futures—appreciating an afternoon, an evening, the next day—or fail to enjoy our partner, children, and others, or to experience a sunset or a starry night. Fail to give meaning to the present and fail to live with present-moment awareness.
Cardaciotto and colleagues defined present-moment awareness as “continuous monitoring of experience with a focus on current experience rather than preoccupation with past or future events.” Present-moment awareness has been associated with improved well-being, reduced anxiety, and other positive psychological benefits. Rychlak would agree. He suggested most of us live in the present (or short-term future) during “times off”—vacations, special evenings, love-making, meditating, exercising, and so forth. He concluded, “the secret of happy living seems to be that such present living is done en route.”
To maximize our potential, we need to understand not just how we use our time, but how our use of time affects who we are becoming.
