Linearity vs Cyclicality of Time

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I'm curious to see how this plays here. I wrote the following for my own group, but I think a lot of people here will vibe with it.

It's kind of long, so TLDR version: I hypothesize that shifting my perspective on time from linear to cyclic helps me keeps my focus on what's important and actionable.

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We have been trained to see time as linear: each day proceeds from the last. Today is a lot like yesterday, and tomorrow will likely be as today. The training started when you first went to school and had to be "on time." It continued with your job -- every American knows what "9 to 5" means. And this linearity expands in the current popular conception of entrepreneurship. The biggest name in business media recommends a "5 to 9" schedule (meaning 5am to 9pm), seven days a week, 365 days a year.

An endless parade of days, one after the other, each like the others, stretching off into infinity.

As a result, we see our actions from a linear perspective: we start a project, work on it until it's finished, and then start new one. Life travels in lines: beginning to end.

If you open your eyes and really SEE, even a cursory glance at reality shows you that all of this is false -- a creation of the human mind, meant to control and constrain our behavior. In June, you show up for your job at 9am and you leave at 5pm. (Though let's be honest: In contemporary America, it's probably more like 8am and 6pm.) In December, you show up for your job at 9am and you leave at 5pm. This is your "workday."

Meanwhile, time actually proceeds in cycles. Actually notice the movement of the sun across the sky and you see a circle, not a line. The moon goes from new to full and back again in its own rhythm, one that doesn't map neatly onto solar days. The sun travels north and south, from solstice to equinox to solstice to equinox, in a cycle that would look like a sine wave if you mapped it. And so a day in December, when the sun seems to groove into its most southward track, is nothing like a day in June, when the sun grooves to the north.

And yet, you show up for work at 9am, and you leave at 5pm. Our concepts of "clock" (on the wall, on your wrist, on your screen) take primacy over the REAL clock -- the spinning of the giant sphere of rock on which we live, such that the sun -- too bright to look at, warming our entire world -- traverses our heavens.

Today I am exploring a new way of making these understandings actionable. I notice how many of the projects I work on are never "done," from the perspective of my actions.

It occurs to me that a cyclic perspective moves our understanding from the objects of our work (nouns) to the actions of that work (verbs). I'll post this piece and it will be "done." But the action that brought it into being -- writing -- is something I do every single day. It's never done. And the concepts that asked to be written here, if they're worth more than a few minutes diversion, don't end either. If this is important, and I believe it is VERY important, then I will revisit this concept again and again, my understanding deepening every time.

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