Unsticking our relationship with time
To dream, we must understand our place on the clock of the world.
Today is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere – a reminder that we live on an orbiting planet dancing in a vast cosmos. For me, the Summer Solstice invokes how small and miraculous we are in the context of spacetime.
Stewarding The People’s Dreaming Collective, I often reflect on what it takes to build our societal capacity for imagination. How do we strengthen our dreaming muscles to envision audacious new futures for how we govern? In unlocking my own ability to dream, one important step has been recalibrating my relationship with time.
Time has always been tethered to scarcity for me. I’ve grown up in a culture obsessed with quarterly returns and the instant gratification of smartphones. Time feels squeezed, like there is too much to fit in. Time feels precious, like it moves too fast.
Recently, we gathered radical public servants from across continents.1 A shared frustration that surfaced was tight timeframes and how they limit our current government institutions. Political pressures and short electoral cycles require us to move fast and demonstrate immediate results, even for complex challenges that have been centuries in the making. What if we zoom out in time?
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In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow opened my eyes to the inspiring diversity of human societies across milennia.2 Instead of telling a linear story of human progress, with our current reality as the evolutionary pinnacle, the book uncovers how “the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms.”
The Dawn of Everything reminds us that our not-so-distant ancestors were successfully engaged in complex egalitarian governing experiments:
“If our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies – say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold the preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on caretaking rather than ownership and extraction – will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids more like historical curiosities...
After all, people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia… It suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”
– David Graeber and David Wengrow
When we operate with shallow time horizons – an annual shareholder report, an electoral cycle, even a single lifetime – we often get stuck believing that our only option is the world as it exists today.
Tight timeframes demand immediate answers, stifling the magic of questions, reflection, and creativity. We become disconnected from the wisdom of our predecessors. We give up the agency and opportunities that come with long-term planning and imagining. Current systems of oppression and exploitation depend on tight timeframes, making “people more worried about the end of the week than the end of the world.”3 The over-emphasis on shortened timescales have enabled tremendous harm to our planet, each other, and future generations.
Thankfully, we have precedents for how to govern in the context of intergenerational time. A recent article in Yes! Magazine titled “Why Intergenerational Thinking Is Essential to Heal the Planet” amplifies indigenous models for how to serve the needs of humans and the natural world across generations.
For example, the Māoris of New Zealand are guided by whakapapa, or the belief that we share a kinship with humans and more-than-human beings across time – this includes plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and mountains. Governing using whakapapa has inspired a 500-year intergenerational plan for business and land management. It also spurred the country of New Zealand to grant legal personhood to natural bodies. Today, the Whanganui River has similar legal rights to a citizen backed by human representatives, resources, and reimagined institutions.
Embracing a more expansive relationship with time unsticks us from our current reality. We explore alternative models and invite in different futures. We slow down, heal, connect, build trust, and dream.
The Chinese-American activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs offers us the question: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” Introduced in the 1974 book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, the clock of the world is imagined by Grace Lee Boggs and co-author James Boggs as a tool to understand 3,000 years of human activity. Every minute stands for fifty years of history, putting current social shifts and theories into perspective.
Taking a long view of time led Grace Lee Boggs to develop “visionary organizing” – an approach to revolution that emphasizes creativity and reflection over protest and rebellion.4 Before passing at 100-years-old in 2015, Grace Lee Boggs assessed that “the time has come for us to reimagine everything” including civil rights organizing, labor, and capitalism. She believed that making the world anew starts with internal transformation and grows: “We have to change ourselves to change the world.”
Broadening my own relationship with time has made me more playful, flexible, and humble. I am learning to de-prioritize urgency and ego. The 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rivers where I live in Northern California are teaching me to think on new timescales. Reshaping broken systems and midwifing more loving forms of governance will not be a fast process. That’s okay! I have begun to understand my role as part of an ecosystem of dreamers slowly shifting the tides of history.5
Now, it’s your turn:
How would you describe your current relationship with time?
Who or what has taught you to see time in new ways?
What does a 500-year governance plan look like in your community?
We would love to hear your reflections! Share feedback by replying to our email, commenting on the post, or writing us at hello@peoplesdreamingcollective.com.
Exciting news! We have convened a dynamic group of radical public servants to participate in a Study/Action Circle on the Innerwork of Loving Governance. We are exploring practices for mindfulness, embodiment, and self-awareness that support transforming governing institutions as insiders turned revolutionaries. We look forward to sharing more as this emergent project develops.
This is one of many love letters celebrating the thinkers, ancestors, teachers, and dreamers who inspire us. We believe naming and acknowledging lineage is an antidote to extraction and a powerful tool for connection. Learn more at Dismantling The Master’s Tools.
This apt reflection on tight timeframes came at a recent Collective Imagination Practice Community gathering I attended. We discussed how to reframe imagination as a human need and a necessary act of political resistance, rather than a frivolity or a privilege.
Learn more about Grace Lee Boggs and visionary organizing through her book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century or the documentary American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.
What becomes possible when we view social change as an ecosystem? A recent conversation with Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton examines this idea and nature's wisdom for humanity via the On Being podcast.
What ancestor would pull you back into time? Can we alter the past? If humanity were able to build a time machine, should we use it? Engage with these questions and more via the dynamic work of the Black Quantum Futurism Collective: https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com/
Thanks to collective member Mari Nakano for sharing this resource!