It's About Time

Leaders promote disequilibrium, change, and growth. These occur within the context of time. Following are musings on time. I offer them as thought starters.

We have all the time there is. Time is democratic. We all have the same number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a month, months in a year. What differentiates us is how we choose to use the time we are given.

Want to live a full life? You already are. Each moment of your life is occupied. You may be eating, sleeping, working, playing, thinking, relaxing, whatever. It is your responsibility to choose how you occupy each moment. You have a full life. With what have you filled your life?

We usually think of time as linear--past, present, future. Yet the past is present in its influence of our current reality, and how we view the future influences the present. If I view a goal as possible or impossible, that perspective will influence how I act in the present. What I have done in the past determines my present and future circumstances. What I do now influences how I perceive the past and future. My present influences how I interpret the past. My view of the future impacts how I perceive the present and past.

There is only the now. We create our past through memory and our future through anticipation. Both are imagination. We image our past and future from the now. Time flows from the now. When is the now? We can’t nail it down. If all there is is the now and we can’t identify that, we have eliminated time.

Life is messy. It is disorderly. We attempt to gain order out of the disorder by gaining control. Control restricts. It eventually strangles the life out of life.

We say that things change in time. But time is change. Without change there would be no time. Change is life. We seek change to avoid boredom. Yet we try to minimize change to gain control. Our attempts to control lead to slow suicide.

We seek to control by knowing. We are limited by what we know. Knowledge locks us in to the past. We can only know what is or has been. Knowledge limits change, which limits life. To stay within the known is to remain in the past.

Knowledge brings clarity. We are unclear about that which we do not know. Growth involves change. This means having to venture into the unknown, which is unclear. Insight is clarity emerging from confusion. Questioning leads to certainty. Certainty eliminates questioning.

Life requires growth, which requires change. This calls for openness. Closed systems experience entropy and die. Perfect equilibrium is death. Open systems evolve to higher complexity.

If you know what I am talking about, I am then simply reiterating what you already know. This reinforces stagnation. If what I share confuses you, then I have moved you into the unknown. It is from the realm of the unknown that growth emerges.

Our situation remains the same when we continue to operate from the known. We simply keep getting what we have always gotten. We may rearrange the furniture, even replace the furniture, yet we are still living in the same house. We must change houses if we are to live in a new place. By changing our minds, we change our lives.