Cyclical Time
Cycles close, new ones begin. Thank you, 2023!
As the year ends, surely we will ask ourselves whether we’ve spent our days wisely. We might beat ourselves up about whether we’ve wasted any time, especially on days when nothing seems to be happening. This feeling comes primarily from the assumption that time is linear, paired with the social pressure of having to always be earning. So the words we use when referring to time—that is, “spending” and “wasting”—says a lot about how we value something intangible yet fundamental to the human experience. We say, “Time is gold,” implying somehow that we can spend something we never owned in the first place. How can you own time? You experience time, but you do not own it; it is very much like a lover who sees their partner merely as an extension of who they are and not as their own person. We do not truly own anything, and within a worldview that tells you that the universe is made up of separate objects, this terrifies us. Do we even own our own body? Do we own our thoughts? We have become so separated from ourselves, alienated from nature and other people.
But we are part of everything, and all things are made up of the same stuff. All distinct things are unique patterns of reality, and they are important because of the shared meaning we give them. But just as the molecule of water is not the wave, our consciousness crashes on the cosmic shore and returns to the sea. Time is like this wave: it is part of the context of existence. Time is the phenomenon of movement. Rethink your concept of transformation—unlike those advertisements that promote a “before” and “after,” we can think of all possibilities as existing at the same time, all here, all Now. Transformation, therefore, is merely paying attention to your preferred thing, and it is almost always internal. The problem is that we are always either looking forward or reminiscing the past, and we never truly experience the present as it is right now. We only react to things we perceive to be true, and things come into our consciousness after a delay precisely because we think too much, about everything, but never about what is.
In Filipino psychology, the concept of “time” is not limited to clocks. Rather, we follow cosmic time, which is cyclical. This is why we can say, with the certainty of the sunrise: May bukas pa (There will be a tomorrow). As Katrin de Guia put it:
Philippine Time, some say, is experiential time. It is “cosmic time,” not “clock-time.” Rather, it is “organic time”—cyclical, oscillating, approximating, alive! It is a “felt time” filled with memories and contemplations—not the repetitive staccato of machine time, or the sterile on/off bytes of computer time.1
In this contextual worldview, which honors memory, serendipity, and choice, we can celebrate existence as it is. We do not have to “spend” time in order to own static objects—rather, we participate in its dynamism! We dance with time, not to get to the end but to enjoy the movement. There is no “point” to a dance, if we think in a linear fashion, wherein there should be a beginning, middle, and end. The dance is the point. For all practical purposes, we can celebrate time as a series of eternal cycles, spirals going deeper and deeper within. And when we reach the “end,” we are simply arriving at the same place we were before, but transformed by the journey.
A year ends and another year begins. Very soon we will once again meet Hanan, daughter of Bathala and goddess of the morning and new beginnings. With openness to adventure and the brass intestines of a mystic-revolutionary, we face the anxiety and excitement of uncertainty: BAHALA NA!
Katrin de Guia, Indigenous Values for Sustainable Nation Building, 2013. Prajñā Vihāra, CC-BY-NC-ND.