Thursday October 25, 2018

Time and time orientation. What is that exactly? One of the my classmates said that everyone has 24 hours a day, everyone has the same amount of time, it's just how they choose to conduct it. That's a monochronic time. The most extremist monochronic cultures believe that time ends somewhere, even though I think we can all agree on that it doesn't.

     There's also polychronic cultures - so called "island time" - that don't really devide a day into hours, they just have moments. Time is flexible and it is based on relationships. They are more likely to find themselves talking to another person even when there's possible tasks to do. Our teacher also gave us a very simple way to look at this: On monochronic time, a train will leave when it's scheduled. On polychronic time, a train will leave when it's full.

     But this is not all there is to time and consuming it. There so happens to be future-, present-, past-, and no time-orientated cultures. If you think about this, it is fairly difficult to find those "no time-orientated" cultures. They are more likely to have sort of no time in their language, everything sort of happens in the moment, they don't necessarily have words for what happened yesterday, a day, a year ago.

     An interesting fact is that you can switch between these time orientations and you can belong to more than one of them. I wonder how it is for a person to change from thinking there is a past and future, to thinking there is only present. Could be way harder than doing it the other way around. Personally I feel like I belong to the three first mentioned, also depending if I have some assignments to do.

     There is also a saying that "what goes around, comes around". Is karma sort of a time measurement? A cycle of time is a real thing and a way to see it could be roughly defined in good and bad karma.

     Later on we were given a printout of the Kluckhohn Model, here's a small explanation on that. It only makes sense that how you see time, also affects how you see the world, the humanity and activity (being, being-in-becoming, doing),, but I've never thought that how I use my time would affect my thoughts on whether I think the human nature is good or evil.