Of the past, present, and future.
“Time is your most valuable resource.”
I’ve heard this or some variation of this many times amongst startup entrepreneurs. It makes sense, startups lack money and resources but the one equaliser they have is time — everyone only has 24 hours in a day, so this is what entrepreneurs must take advantage of to stand a chance of surviving past the first round.
Last year, I heard this from another group of people close to me — my family. This was after unfortunately losing two aunties in the space of two months. The same message but from a different perspective, and yet its parallels are one of the same — time is precious, don’t waste it.
Startup entrepreneurs are quite morbid in many ways — we are extremely liberal with thinking and speaking about the concept of death, but always in the context of business. From the context of my family though, it definitely went beyond business.
Upon reflection, many of my past articles are in relation to time and I don’t think this will cease any time soon. The theme plays in my head constantly as an entrepreneur but even more so lately.
Time is the great leveller for everyone, rich or poor. No one has ever mastered and controlled time, the only thing that you can do is make the most of it while you have it.
This article won’t be about how to be more productive, efficient, or anything specific to time management. It’s simply a reflection piece about how I’ve dealt with the concept of time over the past year, and how it has influenced how I think about life.
This is a reflection piece on my interpretation of the key cornerstones of time; the past, the present, and the future.
The Past
I have always been interested in my family’s past but events last year have fuelled my thirst to learn more. I learnt a lot about where our family came from, how we moved to Australia, what life was like in Vietnam, etc. I’ve been a sponge when listening to stories from my dad and anyone in my family who was alive before me. I’ve soaked up the incredibly fascinating family photos that have been shared by my cousins.
When I hear these stories or look at those photos, I try and imagine the world that those stories and photos were set. I imagine what it would have been like to be in Vietnam in the 50’s and 60’s, and the events that led to living in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, to finally arriving in Australia in the 80’s. There have been so many incredible moments that my family has experienced that truly leaves me in awe.
What truly intrigues me about hearing these stories and seeing these photos is that I get a sense that when these memories are replayed, the past actually comes alive. The storyteller and audience feel not just an emotional response, but also a visceral response, and I wonder whether there is more to it.
We have experienced time generally in a linear fashion — always in the order of past, present, and future. Time is generally also accepted to follow the International System of Units (SI) with a base unit being the second. And yet, there is something intriguing about how we experience time, every second that passes is objectively a second and yet how we experience it is highly subjective. Remember a time when you were having fun? And how that time felt like it went so fast?
Our ability to document the past allows us to create an existence that is atemporal, independent of time.
And yet despite this subjective experience, we all know that time didn’t actually travel faster. Time can feel like it’s faster or slower, but it hasn’t actually violated the physical laws that govern it. We can’t actually escape time, but our ability to remember, tell stories, capture memories through photos and other medium, gives us the ability to actually transcend time. Our ability to document the past allows us to create an existence that is atemporal, independent of time.
So if something can exist atemporally, without a concept of past, present, and future, then can things from the past actually exist now? Is that visceral response something that is triggered by events that haven’t been replayed but are possibly being currently played?
Thinking or learning of the past has prompted me to think about time and its relationship with our consciousness, of our memories. Isn’t it fascinating that we can jump from one memory to another on a whim, completely disregarding time?
The Future
The future is scary. It is exciting. The future is the great frontier, the future is pretty much why we do what we do — so that our tomorrow is an improvement from today.
Working on startups, we have perhaps an even higher sensitivity to the future — we seemingly always talk in terms of potential, opportunity, growth, etc. I think about vision, which is my view of the future, all the time. All the f**n time. It’s the reason why startups can have millions invested in it without it making a cent in revenue.
Perhaps all the recent focus on the past is a slingshot reaction to my extreme focus on the future for such a sustained period. That’s one for the psychologist. Pretty much everything that I do is geared towards the future, and this has meant that a lot of sacrifices have had to be made in the past and present.
Have you ever felt deja vu before? I remember I used to feel deja vu a lot when I was younger. I rarely, ever get the feeling of deja vu anymore. My perception of what deja vu feels like, is that what you just experienced was something you’ve experienced before, yet not from the past, but from the future.
The thought that we can experience the past in the present poses the question — why couldn’t we also experience the future in the present, or like what deja vu feels like for me — experiencing the future in the past?
Familiarity from the future also reminds me of the concept of visualisation. Jim Carrey used it famously, writing himself a cheque for ten million dollars in 1985 dated ten years in the future (he ended up making that amount for Dumb and Dumber in 1995).
Whilst this could be seen as a motivator to believe that you could be what you want to become, perhaps it is just an artefact for what you already know that you are?
The Present
And finally, the present. For some reason, I felt more comfortable writing about the past and future first before tackling the present. Perhaps this reveals the state that I am in, that there are powerful forces that are pulling me into the past and pushing me into the future, whilst leaving a vacuum in the present.
Lao Tze once said, “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” That is a super interesting quote, in more ways than one. Worthy of an entire article to unpack.
Because of my natural inclination towards the future and recently on the past, I have been trying to learn to be more aware, to be more present. After all, regardless of the possibilities of how time behaves, we still live life consciously in the present.
Last year, I was fortuitously introduced to Taoism. I had already been interested in Taoism due to its alignment with sustainability, but never really explored it further until I learnt more about the philosophy. It has since introduced a very important concept to me called Wu wei — action through inaction.
I find surfing as the easiest analogy to understand Wu wei — most of the time on the surf, you aren’t actually doing anything but waiting for the right wave to catch. It is through this inaction that gives you the best chance of catching a wave. Conversely, if you try and catch every wave, you will likely catch none, and instead spend a lot of time in the water exhausted.
So why is Wu wei an important concept? Because in Taoism, the universe is already all that it is and will be, it’s course has already been mapped. By forcing the action, you are in conflict with the universe and thus are actually working against your objective. By understanding the flow of the universe and working with it, it allows you to have the awareness to not paddle against the proverbial wave.
There is a certain circularity to Taoism — I suppose that’s why the Yin Yang is probably the most famous export of Taoism. This flow also possibly allows a different interpretation of time, that perhaps it also behaves in a more circular fashion, rather than the linear nature that we experience.
If time could actually behave in a non-linear nature, then the existing concept of past, present, and future would not work, and this would fundamentally change how we interpret life. Several theories in theoretical physics have surfaced that try and explain the true nature of time — namely block universe theory, string theory, and loop theory.
To that end, I wonder if the English language deliberately intended the word present to also mean a gift.
Fascinating to think about and I’m extremely interested to see the progress of the science, but I struggle to understand the real meaning of all of this. Perhaps there is none because what’s important — what’s always been important, is to be present and live life to the best of what you can consciously perceive and feel. To that end, I wonder if the English language deliberately intended the word present to also mean a gift.
If 2017 was a great year of learning and discovery at a physical level, than 2018 has seen a similar leap from a mental standpoint. So what will this next year bring? Hopefully more growth, but if there has been any lesson from thinking about the past and the future, is that whilst both are important to learn and utilise — it is for naught if you don’t live your life in the now.
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