How We Inhabit Time

On memory, embodied presence, and the question of where the time went.

by Karen Andersen, BSc (Behavioural Neuroscience), E‑RYT 500, YACEP

The beginning of September makes our relationship to time more apparent. Summer isn’t quite over, but routines return, and we see people again we haven’t seen for months. The inevitable question, “How was your summer?” arises, and to reply with more than “Yeah, great!”, we have to stop for a moment and consider where the last few months went, and may follow up with “… but it went by so fast”.

Since witnessing the shapeshifting nature of time with my mom’s progressing dementia, it’s become very real to me how conditional our sense of time can be, both as it’s gauged in the present moment, and later in looking back at what’s remembered of it.

Wondering where time went, as if it’s a lost item in a menagerie, implies that it slipped away without us noticing. Of course we can’t lose time itself, but we can lose the experiences that occurred in the dimension of time. On the other hand, when we learn something new, or do something memorable, we gain friction with our sense of time. The raw ingredients of experience are our perceptions, and in order to perceive, we need to be present in the immediacy of the moment. On the other hand, we know that when our mind is wandering, time seems to slip away. So let’s investigate this idea of presence.

A frequently-advised practice in yoga is “being present”, although I’ve sometimes questioned what we actually mean by that. We can be present with our memories and we can be present with our future plans. We can’t avoid the present, even when we’re time travelling, but the subject of present experience changes. Perhaps what we mean by “being present” is being engaged with what’s happening beyond the projections of our mind. We recruit deeper involvement from the body, our special senses, our even our emotions. With thoughts taking up less of the overall share in our experience, we are able to feel things in a more nascent way. It also lessens the cognitive load of thinking, which can ease mental stress and fatigue.

Now for the sake of argument, let’s take this practice of immediate presence to an extreme. Say we get really good at magnifying our sensory and embodied experience as it happens, such that the field of experience holds very little room for thoughts. In some form of mindfulness practice, this is considered a goal.

But the paradox here is that if we meet the bleeding edge of presence, then the experience loses context, meaning, and even our sense of self. Neuroscientist Heleen Slagter says that if attention is trained very strongly toward the immediate present, “your sense of the future can start to recede,” and with it, your sense of self (article). At risk of overstating the implications of this, there are cases of psychological dissociation arising with intense meditation. If you’re interested in learning more about this check out this talk with researcher Willoughby Britton, PhD.

So we can lose ourselves in the past, future and present, it seems! But most of us navigate a space that fluctuates in degrees of presence and mind-wandering, and that’s a really healthy thing. Focusing more closely on immediate experience, on purpose, is a concentration exercise which can help build attentional flexibility. I don’t remember much from yoga practices unless there’s been something unusual that’s caused me to take a step back and reframe what I’m experiencing in a bigger context. Maybe a teacher has said something I relate to and want to integrate. Or, the experience of my body in a pose is different than what I expected it to be, and a new way of interpreting the pose is imprinted. It’s okay that it’s not memorable, but maybe the practices of attentional stability and embodied presence are tools to be taken off the mat, and into our relationship with others and the world.

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl explained the present in an interesting way. He argued that the present isn’t a vanishing point between the past and future. Our experience is temporally broader, it also contains evidence of what has just happened, and some anticipation of what is coming next. This is like the anti-gitter setting on a video camera, it helps us navigate our experience more smoothly. But more importantly, it allows the practice of presence to have meaning, to be part of one’s ever-changing yet ever present sense of self. Thoughts have a role in a healthy balance between feeling and doing.

Yoga can’t slow time down, and presence doesn’t guarantee that an experience will become memorable. But practice gives us a way to shift the balance between projection and perception: to notice when we’ve wandered and return some attention to what is actually occurring. Maybe in answering the question, “What happened this summer?” doesn’t become a reel of memorable episodes, but rather a feel of time well-spent; present and embodied.