Being in Time

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the

Temporal bandwidth needs to be extended in both directions. Better to look five thousand years forward and five thousand years backward rather than strain to see only the future, which, being nonexistent, cannot resist us. The past, by contrast, tells of what we need to know but would never think to look for.

It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives. And it makes it all but impossible to experience “deep time,” that sense of timeless time which depends on forg