Time and Space Archives - Page 2 of 3

Category: Time and Space (page 2 of 3)

My Story, Other Stories and the Story

There are three levels of stories for each person. The personal story, the universe of stories and over-arching story connecting all stories.

Personal Story
I have a story that is really a set of many stories with me in the center. So normally if I think I my story, I am thinking of myself as the central character in the story. While I play a role in the stories of many other people, if I tell my story, I am telling it from the center. No matter how much I try to diminish my presence or perspective, I can’t tell a story outside of my imagination. If I read or act or direct or simply print another story, I will still influence with my perspective through the way I tell the story. My vocal inflection, my characterization, my decisions of motion or even my choice of typestyle influences the telling of the story.

So the first level of stories are stories told through the lens of my memory and vision with me as the center.

Universe of Stories
The second level of stories are stories from the world around me. My stories are within these stories. These are stories told by family and friends as well as strangers. Thus these stories are told from a center outside myself. Even if someone tells a story with me as the main character, it is still being told from their perspective, their world, their memories and vision. This level includes all stories from all history, so it includes great literature, plays as well as tales told and retold by friends and strangers. It is a brimming, exploding, unwieldy world of stories that start and move in endless directions.

Think of this second level like a universe with planets upon planets and galaxies upon galaxies. The vast web of stories extends beyond the ability of my imagination to even begin to grasp. This universe of stories contains every known and every possible story created by humankind. Every emotion, every plot, every character, every symbol, every detail from every human story is within this grand drama.

The Grand Story (Meta-Narrative)
The third level of stories is the grand story that connects all stories. This story provides the primary lens for all stories. Through this lens we define right and wrong/good and evil. Through this lens we can find points of connection with other stories. Through this story we define words and symbols and characters.

Many people never consciously identify this grand story. In other words, this story influences them in a passive manner. They may not be able to articulate a clear narrative even while appealing to that narrative to make sense of the world. For many, it operates in the background.

Some people suggests that there is no grand story, there is no meta-narrative. While they might deny the existence of an over-arching but they would have difficulty suggesting that we don’t unconsciously appeal to some kind of meta-narrative in the way we process our stories. Some people appeal to the grand story by appealing to our common humanity. This appeal is rooted in a grand story that suggests humans are connected by virtue of our humaness (aka – the brotherhood of man).

What is a story and What is my story?

July 18, 2008 / dougfloyd / 0 Comments

There are probably many ways to define a story and many fancy words to make the definition virtually unintelligible for the rest of us. I was thinking today that on a basic level most, if not all, stories contain a beginning, middle and end. Otherwise, it may simply be an observation. A story indicates motion or change that allows us to speak of a beginning, a middle and an end.

Why a middle? Why not a beginning and an end. Well, I was thinking the “middle” is the transition from beginning to end. No matter how long or short, it somehow connect the start from the finish. Now the telling of story can alter the order of beginning, middle and end in variations such as end, beginning and middle (and back to end again). The variations can be wide-ranging:

beginning, middle, beginning, middle, beginning, middle and end (this is the beginning constantly being redefined which alter the middle and leads to a different end).

middle, end, beginning (I can’t remember but I think memento worked like this).

The various ways we tell a story are not limited just to the structure. We also tell it from a perspective or a point of view. And I don’t just mean through different characters or an omniscient narrator. We might tell it from the point of view of a victim. The same story will look very different it told from the pov of a tireless hero.

Each story contains thousands of other stories. A good example is the Simarillion, where Tolkien tells some of the many stories before the Lord of the Rings. Our personal story works the same way. A story from my life can be as short and simply as the visit to a drive through window at a fast food restuarant. While I may not retell the story often, one day something happens that makes it memorable: bad service or maybe a surprise. That night I tell the “fast food restaurant” to my wife. If the reaction is strong and the story lodges in my memory it may be repeated. If it is really interested, it may be repeated by people beyond my circle of friends.

So stories can take on a life of their own.

The fast food story is one of a many possible stories within a given day. Additionally, there are epochal tracks or repeated scenes/event/stories that combine to former a larger story over time. These stories may be stories may have a defining center that connects them: husband and wife, family, identity, vocation, community, forgiveness, and so on. Different little stories within my life and connect and reconnect with different centers to tell the same story.

I may tell the story of vocation, explaining how I ended up as a bi-vocational minister. Some of the stories within that story when seen from a different angle might combine with other stories to tell the story of my identity. Then again the some of the stories might reform around another center and combine with other stories to tell the story of my 20-year love affair with my wife.

By thinking of my stories in this light, I might begin to see that the stories I tell are not actual events but events filtered through memory combined with imagination/creativity. So a story is creative work that I engage in. I don’t tell the meta story that overarches my life. God tells this story. Sometimes, I see glimpses of his story being told through me, but most often I am clueless as to the richness and fullness and connectedness of that story which connects all stories.

With in mind, I must realize that the story I am telling, I am creating. I am using characters, plots, settings, pace, mood, symbols and more to tell the stories. I have certain lines that I uses again and again, much like the move lines, “I’ll be baaaaaacck” or “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Rarely do we step back from our preoccupation with telling or thinking our own story to analyze. But sometimes it may be helpful.

I might try focusing on other characters. I might consider using a different pov, or a different tone. I might look for other symbols or lines or settings that are already inherent within my stories but I’ve overlooked. I might find a different center, a different connecting points for my little stories. By doing so, I might discover that I could tell my story as a story of sacrifice and suffering at the hands of other in a new way and recast it as a story of power, choice and heroic overcoming of struggles against all odds.

Enough for now. Hopefully, I’ll write more on how I connect my stories with other stories outside myself (literature, arts, history and even the Bible).

Stories upon Stories upon Story

July 16, 2008 / dougfloyd / 0 Comments

Last weekend Rick Doughty, Brad Getz and I did a retreat on story. This was the second retreat in my series of retreats on wisdom. We started with Meditation upon the 10 Commandments, followed by The Wisdom of Stories (last weekend), then we’ll do “Acting Wisely: the Translation of Wisdom into our Active Life,” and finally we’ll conclude with “Creating the Future with Words of Wisdom.” These four retreats follow Eugen Rosenstock Huessy’s “Cross of Reality,” moving from inward (meditation) to backward (storytelling) to outward (active life) to forward (wise words).

A few thoughts recapping The Wisdom of Stories may follow in future blog posts. I’ll focus what I write primarily on the notes that I used in preparation although I may reference Rick and Brad’s thoughts as they come to mind.

Each person’s life is filled with stories. When asked to tell my life story, the answer might actually be, “Which one?” For I am moving and have moved in multiple stories. Whatever I tell you will be an extraction from the wide web of stories. My wide-ranging stories are within a context of a storied world. And then there are many contexts for stories. For instance, if I consider setting as the basis for context, my stories are set within the context of family and friends’ stories that are set withing the context of a communities’ stories set within the context of a culture’s stories set within the context of the stories of the Western World set within the context of The Story (of stories) – The Word of God.

Stories pivot on multiple points some of which include setting, characters, plots, words and lines, action, symbols and images, tone/mood and pace. Each of these pivots reveals a particular dynamic to a story. Some writers capture the essence of certain pivots better than others. Charles Dickens certainly masters characters and settings. While his plots are often intricate and delightful, I think his real genius lay in creating characters within settings.

Edgar Allen Poe and Nathanial Hawthorne captured mood. For me, the feeling captured in Young Goodman Brown is one of the richest aspects of Hawthorne’s dark tale. I personally think this is particular genius of M. Night Shymalan. His stories create a mood that overarches the story. Some critique the story or the characters but the mood is his real gift.

Pace is the tempo of the story. Some recent films have played with pace both increasing pace or decreasing pace to almost a motionless state (Into the Great Silence). Andrei Tarkovsky films slow down pace, which make his films almost unbearable for some people. At the retreat someone mentioned “Napoleon Dynamite” as a great example of a movie tinkering with pace. Good observation! This may be why the movie seems for some to have no point or no action. It’s capturing an almost suspended state of time. “Run Lola Run” is a great example of a film that goes the oppositie direction and is breathless in it’s movement forward. The Bourne films (like many action films) speeds pace to a blinding fury.

Pace makes me think of Louie Armstrong. I once heard Wynton Marsalis say that Louie’s great genius was in capturing the changing pace of the American life. America was moving from an industrial nation to a communications nations where life is non stop 24/7. Louie’s phrasing both with his coronet and his voice plays with pace.

Sometimes setting is the driving force. Gormenghast tells the tale of a castle with endless halls and twists and turns. The story cannot be extracted from the setting. E.M. Forrestor’s Howard’s End plays with setting (both social and physical) in his fateful tale of a house in the country where two women are connected by being joined to the place.

Think of the power of words and line in stories. They can leave the story and take on a life of their own. “I’ll Be Baaack!” or “Go Ahead, Make My Day” became cultural catch phrases used in everyday life to create new meanings. These trendy phrase might be contrasted with the genius of Shakespeare who gave the world words and lines that continue to drive the way we think and talk. Just consider a few of the following (with thanks to Absolute Shakespeare):

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
“This above all: to thine own self be true”.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.”.
“Brevity is the soul of wit”.
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
“All the world ‘s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts”
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”
“For ever and a day.”
“Now is the winter of our discontent”
“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”
“Off with his head!”
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

And the list of familar quotes goes on and on and on. We’ve used his quotes verbatim and we’ve altered them to create new meanings or new contexts, but the the quotes appear on the mouths of many people who’ve never read one line of Shakespeare. His words live on and shape the way we frame our world.

Sometimes an image becomes so striking within a story that the image like the lines above takes a life of it’s own. We speak of a “scarlett letter” as a public disgrace. Hitchcock took common everyday images and turned them into images of terror. Aladdin gives us the “magic carpet.” Pinochio gives us a nose that grows and grows. These images are extracted from stories and used on our everyday discourse to convey meaning and ideas. Sometimes is less than honest and we mention that their nose might be growing.

All the elements I’ve mentioend thus far (plots, settings, characters, words, lines, images, tone/mood, pace) are conveyed in stories and may be the pivotal element in a story that connects with us or speaks to us. We may not remember anything else from a story but the element that moved us. In fact, we can dislike a story while loving a single element that impacts us.

This impact may be called inspiration. Stories and their elements “in-spire” us. We breathe in their influence. We are in “spired” or in “spirited” by the power of the story. Just as we breathe in oxygen and it keeps us alive, we breathe in these elements and they shape the way we understand and communicate and act in our world. The “inspired” stories become a source of wisdom that shapes us and gives us insight in the midst of living.

In the past, I’ve written about Memory and Vision as the life span of a person. I think stories fundamentally capture the movement between memory and vision, extending from our own story to the stories around us to The Story (the Word of God). I contend like Chesterton that the Bible tells The Story and all other stories are subsets of this story. There is a movement of energy, of vitality, of spirit that moves between these stories. As I consider this movement, this conversation of stories, I might begin to think more deeply of the “Holy Spirit” breathing upon creation, but more on this later.

Patterns, Progress, and Lifespans

June 19, 2008 / dougfloyd / 0 Comments

I’ve written before about the idea of how each of our lives represents a span of time that we called a Lifetime or Lifespan. In one sense, each of us live within a particular time because we have particular memories and particular visions. We move in time between memory and vision. This particular movement between memory and vision unfolds in our language, our responses, our actions in the world around us.

If I remember being bit by dogs in the past and I expect that encounters with dogs in the future could result in being bit, then I will have specific responses to the dog in front of me right now that will be different from someone with a differnt timespan of memory and vision in relation to dogs.

But our lifetime is not determined in this sense because surprises can happen. One friend told me that she had a fear of dogs her whole life. While visiting family, she was sitting a bed when the family dog slipped and started to fall from the bed. She instantly responded by catching the dog to break the fall. This act changed her response to dogs. In a single action, she changed and became someone else.

We live within one time, but some-times we can step out of time and change, entering a new time (new memory and vision).

With that said, I do think that there are patterns common to all lifetimes (or most lifetimes). James Jordan suggests that we move in patterns between faith, hope and love. This is a pattern that also appears in Scripture as the movement between Priest, King and Prophet. While I will touch of some of his ideas in the posts about this theme, I will not attempt to develop his idea completely, but will explore some aspects. If you want to see his full thoughts, read From Bread to Wine (see the catalog on Biblical Horizons).

Now to consider patterns think of childhood. There are phases of dependence and trust, growth and exploration, and times of expressing self and defining relation. These phases may not be as clear cut as I lay out here but they do happen and there is a bit of repitition at different ages.

The newborn is totally dependent for clothing, food, care and so on. This is a phase of absolute dependence; an initial phase of trust or faith. While a child is dependent through adulthood, there are some points of particular dependence such as when their first born. Another time of intense dependence is when they first do away to school.

They leave home and now must trust a figure outside the home to function as a surrogate parent. Just of their dependence on the parent helped shaped their identity, this dependence on the surrogate (such as Kindergarten teacher) will also impact their identity. Rules of the classroom and rules in grammar, math and so on become foundational for them to make sense of this new world.

Newborns grow into a toddler phase characterized by growth and exploration. They discover their fingers and toes. They move from sitting/rocking to crawling to walking. They grow from making noises to forming initial words. Some early development is taking place in their body and mind. They are learning and a very early form of reasoning is displayed.

This season of growth and exploration will happen again around 9-14. This is when they shift from being a boy to being a young man and from a girl to a young lady. They become aware of differences and constrasts between family, the sexes, the neighbors and us, the kids at school and our family. Using their developing reasoning skills, they are more willing to argue with other kids (and with parents).

Another phase can be seen in the 3-4 year old as they tell mommy again and again how much they love her. They may become clingy to one or both parents. They start asking “why” hundreds of times a day (which prepares them for the rules phase).

When a child moves into teenage years, the “why” question becomes more pronounced. Their asking harder questions and getting ready to do more reasoning, but their also extremely emotional. They may begin flirt with the opposite sex. They move between highs and lows with sudden emotional outburts. They’ve experienced similar passions at a younger age but these were directed to parents. Now their emotions are directed outwards to friends and potential loves (as well as enemies).

While the phases may not be so clear cut, there repeated seasons where children are totally dependent, form identities in relation to authority figures (and eventually in relation to peers), experience dramatic growth and development, ask questions, shift from thinking to feeling, learn new rules, apply old rules in new ways, break rules. And so on.

The child is growing and repeating patterns again and again–developing their lifetime (memory and vision) which will shape their ongoing formation in adult years. At the same time, there are always possiblities along the way for dramatic invasions from outside their memory and vision that will shape their lifetime for both good and bad.

These pattern of rules, relationships, reason, emotions, growth and so on occur over and over throughout our lives. So in one sense, our lifetime is similar to the circular motion on a clock. Repeating hour after hour. At the same time, unexpected events can alter the cycle or challenge us to step outside one cycle and enter a new rhthym. An retired widower may suddenly decide to learn the the blues and travel around the world.

We are free to change within our lifetime. This freedom to step out of one cycle and into another is part of what makes us human. And yet, even as we step between cycles, we will still face internal and external periods focused on identity, relationships, rules, growth, questioning, stories, and so on.

Thank You Dumitru Staniloae

May 29, 2008 / dougfloyd / 3 Comments

There is a sweetness in the writings of Dumitru Staniloae that draws me into the love of God. This precious Orthodox theologian opened the gift of relationships within time and space for me. I was struggling to understand the problems of the West and the modern world in the way we articulate and understand time and space when I first discovered Staniloae.

Instead giving me the answers, he caused me to raise more questions. And I am grateful for that holy stirring in my soul. Like Heschel, Staniloae suggests that the modern world tended to spacialize time and invert the proper order of time over space. When writing about time, Staniloae says that time is the interval between the offer of love and the reciprocation to that offer.

But maybe I better back up a moment. Staniloae introduced me to another aspect of Maximas the Confessor beyond the four hundreds texts on love. He develops the creational vision of Maximas in his writings. Staniloae suggests that when God chose to create humans (in his image), God created time and space as to planes where humans could move (in differing ways) towards love. Thus time and space provide a plane of motion for movement toward love in relationship with God and with other humans.

At first this may be a little difficult to wrap around, but I encourage to let it simmer in your thoughts and heart. It will unfold riches of the beauty of this creation. As a way of offering some glimpses into Staniloae’s writings, I am posting a segement from his little pamphlet “The Victory of the Cross.” This 20 page treasure opens in the riches of the cross in ways that most of us completely miss.

Here is the opening paragraph from this meditation on the cross of suffering in our lives:

The world is a gift of God, but the destiny of this gift is to unite man God who has given it. The intention of the gift is that it should be continually transcended. When we receive a gift from somebody we should look primarily towards the person who has given it and not keep our eyes fixed on the gift. But often the person who receives the gift becomes so attached to the gift that he forgets who has given it to him. But God demands an unconditional love from us for he is infinitely greater than any of the gifts which he gives us; just as at the human levels the person who gives us a gift is incomparably more important than the gift which he has given and should be loved for himself and ot only on account of his gift. In this way every gift requires a certain cross, and this cross is meant to show us that all these gifts are not the last and final reality. The cross consists in an alteration in thie gift, and sometimes even in its entire loss.

I am planning to put some notes on his themes on the cross soon, and I’ll post them. But I’ll pause now simply to say thank you for the gift of writing you gave. May I move beyond the gift to love God and others more fully.

How Does the World Come to An End?

May 16, 2008 / dougfloyd / 1 Comment

Well, it can blow up. Poof. Bang. Boom. All gone.

Some worlds ends suddenly. Our church caught fire in February, and suddenly that world was over. Permanently. The things we salvaged now sit in storage, awaiting the new world. Then again a sudden lay-off may bring a sudden end to the world. In 1992, I was in graduate school and working full time to pay for it.

One morning I went in to work, and suddenly I didn’t have a job. I dropped out school for the next seesion, and when I did return, everything had changed. I was no longer studying film. My focus had changed, and I was planning to return to ministry. When the world ends, those who survive go about starting a new world.

Another way the world might end is through decay. Stand amid the ruins of ancient Greece, and you can see a world that is gone. The Parthenon may impress but it is just a shell. A reminder of a world that once was. Oddly enough, the structures of a world remain long after the world has died. Some organizations survive from generation to generation but the world is dead. There is nothing there but the machinery that causes people to keep the skeleton cleaned.

A series of disasters can bring the world to an end. The medieval world suffered one devastating blow after another. The crusades, the great famine, the black plague and other disasters brought this world to an end. The survivors who remained built a new world that laid the foundation for the modern world.

Then again, a new world can be planted in the middle of the old world. Like yeast it can work its way out through every fiber of the old world, creating a new world in the midst of the old. When Jesus goes to the cross, he talks about a seed falling into the ground so that it can die, and yield a great harvest. A harvest that overtakes the old world and makes all things new.

Whether it’s a business, a dream, a project, a community, a country, or a civilization worlds end and new world are created. Who creates the new world? Created in the image of God, we create new worlds through our words and actions. Even as He works in and through His people to create a new world in the midst of a fallen one (but more on that later).

Lifetime of a Nation

May 6, 2008 / dougfloyd / 0 Comments

Our “lifetime” is intimately bound up with the “lifetime” of our people. We have a particular lifetime that moves between our own personal memory and vision, but this movement between memory and vision does not happen in isolation from other individuals. Our memory and vision is bound in with the memory and vision of our family, and our family memory and vision is bound in some way with specific communities.

And this multi-layered movement between memory and vision helps to shape our understanding of the world and our expectations of the world. Thus it shapes our language and what we mean by using specific words. For example, the word “justice” can mean one thing to a people living on the edge of survival and something entirely different to a people living in comfort.

But there’s a problem with our sense of meaning that grows out from memory and vision. We cannot remember very well. So the movement between memory and vision is skewed in one sense, and this skews our language, our expectations, our lifetime. In my own personal life, I easily forget events and moments that may play a significant role in shaping me.

A photograph of past experiences may remind me of events and experiences that I only vaguely remember. Additionally, my experience in a particular event is limited to one point of view. This experience may cause me to remember certain things in an exaggerated manner. In turn, I may form expectations that are incorrect. I may have one bad memory of a visiting the dentist as a child, and continue to hold fearful expectations of future visits. This skew in memory multiplies through my own life and in the life of my family and community.

I remember some things of my parents’ life and even few things of their parents’ lives. But my memory rarely reaches back farther than two generations. And even in those two generations it can be skewed. This problem only multiples and expands outward as I think about my culture. As a result, I may develop a family memory or cultural that is incorrect.

What I think are long held attitudes or traditions may only stretch back 30 or 40 years. As I look farther back, I may tend to misunderstand or misread the events prior. If I am part of a people and a culture, how can I remember the story of the people farther back into time?

This is the power of words. Words carry the symbolic weight of memory and vision. But like a photograph, words must be captured in a way that spans across generations. Oral cultures carry the words through storytellers. The stories are acted out in celebration through feasting, dancing and other rituals that carry the words into actions to help reinforce the memory.

Unfortunately, without the storyteller the memories can still be lost. And the rituals can become actions with no referent. The people may forget why they do what they do. The rituals may take on meanings that were never part of the story. Soon the span between memory and vision is deeply skewed and the lifetime of the people is askew.

This is the gift of ancient Israel. Their festivals, their laws, their rituals are rooted in Torah: in a written law. The word is recorded and passed down. (I realize that some people reject the written word in ancient Israel and suppose it is all oral, but if I accept the text at face value, they wrote down the words. See Jim Jordan for more on this.) The written word becomes a standard the perpetuates the enacted word.

Every year the people re-enact ancient memories according to prescription (written instructions/law). Using prescribed actions, they rehearse the past. They rehearse the Passover. This communal re-enactment of the deliverance from Egypt helps to forge common memory. Using the written word as guide and interpreter, their actions work memory into their bodies: their eyes, hands and feet.

These festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and so forth do not simply re-enact the past. Gradually, as more revelation unfolds, they begin to realize the festivals are also re-enacting the future. The Passover does not simply point back to the time when God delivered Israel from the hand of Egyptian oppressors, it helps to explain future deliverance as well.

In fact, the Christians will revision the memory as pointing also the Jesus Christ. The full deliverance of God’s people from slavery. For the Christian, these memories become markers of historical events that anticipate an even greater future unfolding. This use of memory and rehearse to interpret or project vision helps to forge a common memory and vision across space and time.

In one sense, we are learning to remember the past together. We are learning to anticipate the future together. We are bound by one hope of calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father. This continual reconnecting through the Word and Sacrament binds the people of God afresh into one memory and vision, which in turn helps to interpret and correct our personal and familial memory and vision.

Time as Memory and Vision

May 1, 2008 / dougfloyd / 2 Comments

Now to continue with the idea of time in our life.

Each person is born on a specific day at a specific time. Additionally, each person has a unique body and lives in the same body until the day she dies. Thus each of us lives in a particular space and a particular time.

When a person dies, we will speak of his lifetime: life-time. No two people share the same lifetime. So we all have a unique time associated with our life.

Now think of a child. The child experiences the world around him through his specific body. At the earliest stages, he’ll experience the care and nurture from his mother, the voice of his mother, the smell of his mother and so on. As his brain develops, he begins to make sense of the world through these experiences.

These experiences become the foundation of memories. By looking backward, we form certain expectations of the present and future. At her first birthday, a child has no expectation or understanding of what is happening. Each year the ritual is repeated. Additionally, the child experiences a repetition of the birthday ritual at birthday’s from other member’s of the family.

Over the years, the child begins to expect a birthday party, a cake, presents and all the other associations of the birthday. In fact, the child will look to the future at an upcoming birthday, anticipating the festivities to come. As the child looks back to past birthdays and forward to a future birthday, the child will ask her parents for a gift. The child will ask her parents for a party. The child may say things like, “I’m four-and-a-half.”

By looking back and looking forward, the child responds by speaking and acting in certain ways. Thus time (the child’s time that includes both past and future) gives birth to thoughts and actions in space. Another way we might speak of the past and future for a child or any specific person is to speak of memory (past) and vision (future).

All of us move between memory and vision. Memory and vision defines the time of each particular person. As we look back and look forward, we make sense of the world. Because we each have a different set of experiences and expectations, we make sense of the world in different ways, or we live in different times.

Compare a young man and an older man. The young man has fewer memories, fewer disappointments, fewer failures. He is more flexible both in mind and body. In this sense, the young man has more energy for ideas and action. Thus he is an idealist. He lives in “ideal times.”

The older man has known crisis. He has watched dreams die and expectations go awry. He has seen friends make wrong choices or he himself has made poor choices. While he may understand the world better than the young man and he may have learned great lessons from his mistakes, he is not as flexible as the young (not in mind or body). He lives in “experienced times.”

The young man and the older man may have difficulty communicating or even speaking the same language (using the same words to mean different things). The young man may say, “I am always going to have passion and I am not ever going to compromise.” The older man may say, “You simply don’t understand the ways of the world.” They are living in different times.

Now I multiply this small picture across a community, a nation, a world of people. People live in different times. As a result, they understand and act on symbols (words and more) in different ways. While each person lives in a unique time, they may share enough similarities with other people to be put into a group.

We might speak of the group in terms of nationality (American, German, Chinese) or we might group by economic class (poor, middle class, rich). Each grouping implies a degree of shared times that allows people within the group to communicate and cooperate in specific ways.

More later.

What's the Time on Your Life Clock?

May 1, 2008 / dougfloyd / 0 Comments

When you need to know the time, you might look at your life instead of your wrist. We’ve become so conditioned by the wristwatch, that we’ve really lost our ability to know the time. We may be able to recite the hour of the day, but I’m afraid we may have know idea how to read the time and the times.

Yesterday, I considered how a calendar might begin to help us understand time and the movement of people through time. Today I want to specifically consider time in the life of a person. Our life has its own time. Thus we can speak of a person’s lifetime. We have a specific birth time and will have a specific death time. Between those two points in time, we live through many different sets of time.

Instead of simply thinking of seconds, minutes and hours, we might think of other ways to define time. For instance, we mark each day as a specific measurement of time, and then we associate meaning with specific days. People will say things like, “I hate Mondays.” Or “Friday is finally here.” We group Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday together and define that unit of time as the weekend.

We mark the passing of years. Each year we celebrate with a birthday. In one sense, every time we pass a time marker the world around us changes. We change our words, our clothes, and even our relations. At a basic level, we change our words. I am 43, but after my next birthday I’ll refer to myself as 44. So we measure changes in years. Then again, decades are even more significant. So people will often reserve special celebrations for the changing of decades such as 20, 30, 40, 50 and so on.

But not all are units of time are equal sets (like the minute and hour of the watch). We look at a person’s life and may divide by time segments such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, teenager, young adult, middle age, and so on. Each of these time units (or epochs) might be used to explain other epochs. For example, the epoch of childhood might be used to explain the teenage period. We may explain a teenager’s poor or unusual behavior by pointing back to their childhood. We looking back to an earlier epoch to understand a current epoch.

But we can also look forward to a future epoch to help understand the present. A teenager might look to the future and dream of being a doctor as an adult. The future epoch will give the teenager direction for study and preparation in the present.

While I’ve used years and development terms (adolescence, teenager, etc) as time designations, there are many more in each person’s life. We might measure life from job to job. Or before marriage and after marriage. All these ways of thinking about world during our lives, provide filters for meaning. Our times help us to define or find meaning in the world. Now there is another way to think about time within a person’s life: memory and vision.

From Clocks to Calendars

April 30, 2008 / dougfloyd / 2 Comments

If I ask a person, “What time is it?” Normally they will respond with an answer that includes hour and minutes such as, “It’s 5:45.” The clock and the watch have trained us to think of time in terms of minutes and hours. While we don’t normally count time in terms of the second hand, our watches usually provide us with the ability to count seconds as well.

While this is one way of thinking about time, it has actually limited our field of sight by reducing the vast ways we should think about time. We think we are managing minute blocks of time, so we scribble on our calendars and PDAs and Blackberrys, 30 minute meetings, 60 minutes meetings, and so on. But the idea of time management is much more ancient than trying to follow a hectic schedule that may or may not have any lasting sginificance.

A better way to think about time and time management might be in terms of calendar instead of clock. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy suggested that if you want to understand people from a given point in history, you should look at their calendars. What days and weeks do they observe as significant?

Calendars teach us that for over several millenia, people have counted time in terms of significant points in time. They associated meaning with specific points in time. For example, two of the oldest points in time that people have counted are the spring and fall equinox. Planting and harvest are activities that took place during these events, but the activity is hinged with significance beyond simple survival.

The spring and fall equinox were “times” to exercise tribal memory. Consider Halloween. This ancient holiday has had different names and manifestations, but it has consistently remained a time for remembering. The idea of dressing as skeletons or ghouls would be a connection with some Celtic traditions of looking back to ancestors or spirits that have not freely entered into rest.

So the calendar provides a way of remembering. In the church, the liturgical calendar is rooted in memory. Not simply memory as thoughts but memory as action. We remember the birth of Christ by certain activities. We mark the memory. We build a monument in time: a memorial. This memorial serves as a reminder for who we are and the community that helps to define us.

As long as we are limited by minutes and hours, we do not have the ability to really see time: past and future. This infatuation with measuring and controlling small bits of time, limits our ability to really understand who we are, where we are and what we are supposed to do. As a result, we become slaves to the urgency of the moment. And in one sense, time then becomes captive to space.

We search for significance in timeless space such as nicer cars, bigger houses, more stuff. Without the weightiness of time, this stuff is empty. Simply look at the latest foible of some rich and foolish to see the emptiness of lots of stuff with no weighty significance of time.

A healthier understanding of time moves between the past and the future through memorials. By looking back and forth, we might begin to see larger epochs of time. We might think in terms of years, decades and even centuries. Our grasp of time and our call to act in time will move us beyond actions that benefit us in this moment, this hour, this minute. Rather, we learn to act in ways that anticipate, and create a future that extends far beyond us.

Obviously, this way of thinking and acting is not appealing if I need immediate satisfaction. If I am in fact a slave of space, and I want my moment in the sun now, I will not see any value in acting in ways that benefit the future or in some ways complete the past.

But if I want to act and speak in ways that are rooted in the weightiness of time, I must rethink the way I approach time and the way I respond. To help us better understand where we are and what we are to do, we can draw from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s cross of reality and think in terms of moving in four directions: past, future, inner and outward. These four directions encompass time and space.

To think more about the relation of time and human, I will write the next post on life-time.

Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.