Time, our most precious resource, even if we don't know what it is.

Time is no doubt now one of our most precious commodities. We're inclined to buy our time back at whatever we determine to be a reasonable rate. Yet, it was St Augustine who said in his Confessions:

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one who asketh, I know not"

But even if we cannot understand exactly what it is, it has a distinct impact on how we view the world and our place in it.

For instance, if I were to label the dot in the box below as lunch (or whatever it might be that you call the meal you might eat in the middle of the day), where might you place breakfast (your first meal) and dinner (your last meal)?

Now, if you've grown up in a predominately English speaking and reading culture, you've most likely put breakfast to the left of the box and dinner to the right of the box, both on the same horizontal axis to the original dot.

But this doesn't hold if you've grown up reading Asian script that reads top to bottom. Then breakfast goes at the top and dinner at the bottom, on the same vertical axis. If you've predominately read Arabic or Hebrew, then it is more likely you'll put breakfast on the right and dinner on the left.

Of course, however, there are a tonne of other time assumptions within this little experiment. For instance that there is a 3 meal a day rhythm to life. Or that time can be bound within a box. Or that time is even best represented in 2D space. Or that meals are best measured in a daily rhythm...etc, etc.

Ultimately we'll have a sense of time like St Augustine alludes to, but unless we are called to think further upon it, it's unlikely we become aware of the impact our perspective has on our lives.

One of the shortfalls when it comes to our Western understanding of time is to predominantly see time as linear and moving forwards only. Whilst such a focus does have positives, one of the negatives is that we can lose sight of the important repetitive rhythms of time that call the past again into the present. Something an older cyclic understanding of time held in high value.

Where did you put your breakfast and dinner dots? What rhythm of time from the past maybe needs to return to your present?