Time speeds, lags, drags, blends, and blurs through imper­ma­nence. With sophis­ti­cat­ed mechan­i­cal mea­sure­ments, we might think we have a han­dle on time, but this sense of con­trol is anoth­er com­mon misconception.

We feel time’s elas­tic­i­ty in our most intense moments: the slow motion of a car crash, the sped-up fury of a pan­ic attack, an action-packed sports play replayed down to the sec­ond, con­trast­ed with the for­get­table sec­onds spent star­ing at the ceil­ing from the couch.

“Time keeps on slip­pin, slip­pin, slippin…into the future…” — Steve Miller Band, “Fly Like An Eagle”

Time can be mea­sured in clear min­utes on our mechan­i­cal clocks. But our bio­log­i­cal clocks doc­u­ment time very dif­fer­ent­ly. We can chart time a thou­sand ways and yet it still remains so slip­pery to per­ceive. Time seems to move faster as we age, as each moment becomes a small­er frac­tion of our over­all experience.

In the 1988 Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion series Joseph Camp­bell and the Pow­er of Myth, host­ed by jour­nal­ist Bill Moy­ers, mythol­o­gist Joseph Camp­bell reminds us, “Every­thing in the field of time is dual” and if you “put your mind in the mid­dle” of this dual­i­ty, you gain access to the eter­nal. While dual­i­ties per­sist, Camp­bell relates how, “I know that good and evil are sim­ply tem­po­ral appari­tions.”¹⁹ By this he means we do not need to choose between these polar oppo­sites if we can learn to let go of time. In that free space, so many oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties emerge…

When we stop let­ting time explain who we are and where we are in our lives, we gain a dif­fer­ent sense of self. If we count our age in days rather than years—as does author and teacher Peter Rus­sell with his online day count­ing tool²⁰—we might sig­nif­i­cant­ly shift our per­cep­tion of per­son­al experience.

There are entire groups of peo­ple who relate to time much dif­fer­ent­ly than the major­i­ty of glob­al soci­ety does. In the Ama­zon, the lan­guage of the Amon­dawa tribe does not have a word for time. Because the Amon­dawa peo­ple do not speak of time, they also do not refer to their ages. Instead, they change their names to reflect dif­fer­ent stages of their lives (as one changes by becom­ing involved in a part­ner­ship, or becom­ing a par­ent or grand­par­ent) or as they achieve a dif­fer­ent sta­tus with­in their com­mu­ni­ty. With­out the pas­sage of time being the sig­na­ture ref­er­ence for where some­one is in their life, one’s iden­ti­ty instead becomes a reflec­tion of the rela­tion­ships they expe­ri­ence.²¹ Imag­ine liv­ing just one day with­out being con­cerned by the time indi­cat­ed on a clock but, instead, fol­low­ing the nat­ur­al rhythms of the sun in the sky to guide your own rhythm of wak­ing, work­ing, eat­ing, and sleep­ing. In con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, we most like­ly do not have the sup­port sys­tem of an entire tribe to give shape to our sched­ules with­out the intro­duc­tion of time. Yet, we can still gain insights by rely­ing less on time to tell us when to per­form cer­tain acts, or even who we are meant to be.

The influ­ence of time can eas­i­ly per­me­ate our expe­ri­ence of life. In Felt Time: The Psy­chol­o­gy of How We Per­ceive Time, Ger­man psy­chol­o­gist Marc Wittmann explores dif­fer­ent dimen­sions of time and the con­cept of how our sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of time’s pas­sage shapes our emo­tions and sense of self. Wittman’s book high­lights how when we pay such close atten­tion to time in order to feel like we are in con­trol of the dif­fer­ent phas­es of our days, then our days—through detailed sched­ules and calendars—become reflec­tions of time. In oth­er words, the more that we account for time in giv­ing shape and mean­ing to our lives, the more that our lives become an expres­sion of time itself. ²² In this sense, human per­cep­tion and the mea­sure­ment of time are bound to one another.

If we can let go of time as a key ref­er­ence for how we orga­nize our days and how we cat­a­log our mem­o­ries, then time will cease to be such an impor­tant indi­ca­tor of our identities.

In the absence of an author­i­ta­tive sense of time, we are able to expe­ri­ence our­selves non­lin­ear­ly, and with more expan­sive­ness. We come to sense the var­ied flows of time. And, with this prac­tice, our self-per­cep­tion can become more of an evolv­ing process in a con­stant state of rede­f­i­n­i­tion. We can then begin to regard events and expe­ri­ences in our lives as inte­grat­ed, cor­re­spond­ing ele­ments rather than fixed, sta­t­ic moments. With these new process­es in play we can work toward a bet­ter under­stand­ing of more ethe­r­i­al phe­nom­e­na, like how one sin­gu­lar smile can pass between strangers or through­out gen­er­a­tions of a family.