Timelines

What time is it? Is it Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time? What time zone are we in? Do you have time to look at this? Time to read this? Is there time to comment? How long before we escape this meeting?

In the last twenty years I worked I warned employers that the longest time I would last during a meeting was fifteen minutes. After that I would fall asleep. Why were they shocked when it actually happened?

Nothing personal, but don’t waste my time with frivolous meetings when I could just as easily be working or sleeping. Which is what I did. In a typical American life where there was more to do than I had time to do it, time spent sleeping during unnecessary meetings was time well spent.

If it happens to you, I am here to reassure you that what you are doing is absolutely fine. It is an object lesson to management that their meetings are boring and unnecessary. The best meetings I’ve ever held involved everybody bringing their own cup of coffee, talking for five or ten minutes and then going back to work.

Real work in whatever factory, office or machine shop I was in at the time.

My timeline is simple, if not straightforward.

Maybe it was reading James Bond books during the early years of 007 movies. Maybe it was the childhood years spent engrossed in characters from Miss Marple to Smiley. Learning that there is time for productive thought and action. Not to be ill-spent. Whatever it was, whether it was learning in books or real life how fleeting are our days, I became conscious of time.

Time did not fit the way I had been told it ought. The clocks showed twelve hours divided into sixty minutes. A straightforward timeline.

It failed to explain what really happened to time.

My boyhood experience of time was that one moment I was sitting in my classroom with thirty other students. Without warning I was aware that I was someplace else. I was simultaneously living another life thousands of miles away. Versions of my physical body was in both places. However different one appeared from the other. On some occasions my mind was in both places. Not always. There were times when my childhood body was left scarcely aware of my surroundings in a classroom while my fully conscious mind — my soul, if you will — was on the other side of the world. On the other side of the world I could observe the boy sitting at a desk while my real body, my real self, was living an entirely dissimilar life thousands of miles away.

In my real body I was a free man. Right up to the moment I was called back to the time where clocks ruled my world. Where I felt imprisoned by the smallness of my timeline.

In the time where I was my real self I knew that one breath at a time, one day at a time, I could do anything. I could live among condors and falcons. Be half a world away while being in a small town school in the middle of America.

One minor switch, a deviation in time or place, and the life I led in that small town would have been completely different. There were some very real possibilities of living in other states or countries, even continents. The person I am now would not exist. I would be an entirely different person because of circumstances of which I was unaware and uninformed at the time.

I would not have written this. You would not be reading this.

The dual timeline of my childhood, which I was taught not to reveal for fear of punishment and ridicule, would have been entirely altered. The places to which I bilocated would have remained the same. But the place where the child in this timeline came from would have been entirely altered. Thus creating a different person.

The most direct way to think of it is to consider your own childhood. What if, wherever you lived, you had been raised in a place almost exactly opposite? If you grew up travelling and going to school in many places around the country or the world, imagine if you had lived in one place your first eighteen years. If you spent your childhood in one place, reimagine yourself as someone taken to a distant country as a youngster.

Imagine the probabilities of what may have happened.

Think of how very different — in all ways, good or bad or other — you might be at this particular moment in time.

The theoretical straight line your life has followed is neither straight nor linear. You always have a smorgasbord of choices for every decision you make.

The choices for that timeline continues throughout life.

Connect with your real timeline.

Discover who you are beneath who you think you are.