Experiencing Reality Just as the Rest of Nature Does

As a boy, the closer it got to Christmas, the slower the days would pass. We would say, "I can't wait!" barely able to contain the anticipation, but wait we did, finally awaking on the day of magic and presents.

My wife Jennifer and I recently spent a weekend in a place that is a two-and-a-half hour drive from our home. The 2.5 hours getting there seemed interminable, while the trip home, despite taking the exact same time on our clocks, just flew by.

Clock time and lived time are two different things. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes of the difference between time lived upright and active (vertical time) as opposed to time lived simply lying about (horizontal time). When we're fully engaged in life, lived time tends to pass in the blink of an eye, yet upon reflection it, when we consider all that we've done, that same time feels long. On the other hand, life lived in the horizontal (like spending months in bed in a sanatorium as Mann's character Hans Castorp does in the novel) the days pass slowly, while in hindsight, they are a blur into almost no duration at all.

This feeling of duration is the lived experience of time. Clock time is different. For one thing, it's divided up into hours, minutes, and seconds. Scientists sometimes measure time in nanoseconds (one billionth of a second), but no matter how small the unit, the clock still creates the illusion that time passes in ticks and tocks rather than, as it we experience it, as a flow. Lived time is not granular. It's continuous, the past blending and shaping the present emerging moment. As philosopher Henri Bergson sees it, when we experience time as long or short, this felt difference is duration. Duration is tied to awareness. It's how reality unfolds for each individual, not how it's measured externally.

By now, most of us have heard the astounding news that the overwhelming majority of physicists are convinced that time is not a fundamental aspect of reality. The math tells them that there is no good reason why time should flow from past to future the way we experience it. They tell us that our experience of time is a psychological phenomenon rather than something real.

When we observe children at play, we are the ones watching the clock while the children are immersed in duration, an ever-emerging present in which time stretches, compresses, and flows. Nature does not create measuring tools, like clocks, only humans do; nature does not read measuring tools, only humans do. Clock time is an attempt to stand outside of the flow of lived time in order to measure it objectively. This is, of course, an absurdity: it presupposes the possibility of measuring time and reading measurements of time from the perspective of no where. This is an impossibility because we are always, inevitably, viewing reality from within reality, and that requires a perspective from somewhere.

And from within reality, time is experienced as duration.

Young children might look at the clock in imitation of our adult habits, but it has nothing to do with reality. They have not yet learned to perceive time as units to be managed, but rather they know it as a flow, thick with memory, imagination, and meaning. This is exactly what we witness in their play, time stretching, looping, and disappearing. This is why clock-based schedules are so difficult for so many young children. They have not learned the to obey this arbitrary measuring tool. It's why clean up time always comes too soon or lunchtime comes too late.

We adults, of course, live in a timetable world, one that is regulated by the myth of time as being comprised of discrete, consistent, replicable units. It's an illusion that our children will one day have to adopt, but just as preschoolers are typically not developmentally ready for literacy or math instruction, they are likewise not capable of stepping outside their lived experience of time as duration. This is why I urge early childhood educators to abandon clock-based schedules in favor of duration-based routines.

One of the joys of working with young children is this opportunity to spend our days living inside time's emergent now, something that can't be measured, only experienced. When we allow young children to lead us there, we are finally experiencing reality just as the rest of nature does. That's a gift young children give us.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!