How picturing chairs affects your ability to schedule a meeting (part 3)
The thing about the visualizing chairs and ropes of the previous two posts is that I think there is a loose connection to the way Christians embody time.
The first group was asked to visualize pulling the chair toward them using the rope. When they did, people generally thought that to "move the meeting forward" in time meant to have things move closer to you. To put it another way, when we think of time this way - we are the center. Events or things that "move forward" move closer to us. Human is the center of the universe.
The second group was asked to visualize pulling themselves forward along the rope toward the chair. When they did, people generally thought that to "move the meeting forward" in time meant to have the meeting pushed farther away from the individual. That is to say the event was pushed "forward" into time.
Notice that subtle difference? The first group visualizes the event being pushed forward toward themselves and the other group visualizes the event being pushed forward into time.
Is time happening to you and passing you by (as in when you pull a chair toward you)?
Or are you moving into time (as in when you pull yourself along a rope toward the chair)?
Many of my sister and brothers in the Faith believe that there is a chair out there they call it the end of the world. That date is set and it is getting closer to us. So there are predictions and claims made about this chair that is coming toward us. We are passive observers in this situation in which there is nothing that we can do to keep that chair from getting closer to us. And once that chair has passed us, then there is no way to get it back in front of us. We missed our chance.
I suppose that is one way to consider time.
On the other hand, if we understand that time is something we are pulled into; that we are being pulled along a rope into a future that is not yet set. That events can move toward us (lets take the destruction of the world since we are talking about it), and they can move in response to other things. The world has been on the brink of destruction a few times in the past in which people cried out that the end is near. And yet, here we all are. That chair, that date, has been moved forward into time.
When time is considered in this way, there is always a chance that things can move forward again (even if they have passed us). There is always a chance for a second chance. That chair might have passed us as we were pulled along that rope, but that chair can always be moved "forward" into time and we can see that chair again. Grace is the name Christians call this chair moving forward into time.
Hopefully I am being clear here and not too cerebral, but this has ramifications on the way we see the world.
According to one view of time, time comes toward you and if you miss something, you have missed your chance and there is no way (either in this life or the next) to have a second chance.
According to one view of time, we move into time and if we miss something there is always a chance that what we missed could move forward into time and we could (either in this life or the next) have a second chance.
To bring this series full circle, I ask "Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?”
(Although, in some instances having a second chance would ruin a hilarious website.)
The first group was asked to visualize pulling the chair toward them using the rope. When they did, people generally thought that to "move the meeting forward" in time meant to have things move closer to you. To put it another way, when we think of time this way - we are the center. Events or things that "move forward" move closer to us. Human is the center of the universe.
The second group was asked to visualize pulling themselves forward along the rope toward the chair. When they did, people generally thought that to "move the meeting forward" in time meant to have the meeting pushed farther away from the individual. That is to say the event was pushed "forward" into time.
Notice that subtle difference? The first group visualizes the event being pushed forward toward themselves and the other group visualizes the event being pushed forward into time.
Is time happening to you and passing you by (as in when you pull a chair toward you)?
Or are you moving into time (as in when you pull yourself along a rope toward the chair)?
Many of my sister and brothers in the Faith believe that there is a chair out there they call it the end of the world. That date is set and it is getting closer to us. So there are predictions and claims made about this chair that is coming toward us. We are passive observers in this situation in which there is nothing that we can do to keep that chair from getting closer to us. And once that chair has passed us, then there is no way to get it back in front of us. We missed our chance.
I suppose that is one way to consider time.
On the other hand, if we understand that time is something we are pulled into; that we are being pulled along a rope into a future that is not yet set. That events can move toward us (lets take the destruction of the world since we are talking about it), and they can move in response to other things. The world has been on the brink of destruction a few times in the past in which people cried out that the end is near. And yet, here we all are. That chair, that date, has been moved forward into time.
When time is considered in this way, there is always a chance that things can move forward again (even if they have passed us). There is always a chance for a second chance. That chair might have passed us as we were pulled along that rope, but that chair can always be moved "forward" into time and we can see that chair again. Grace is the name Christians call this chair moving forward into time.
Hopefully I am being clear here and not too cerebral, but this has ramifications on the way we see the world.
According to one view of time, time comes toward you and if you miss something, you have missed your chance and there is no way (either in this life or the next) to have a second chance.
According to one view of time, we move into time and if we miss something there is always a chance that what we missed could move forward into time and we could (either in this life or the next) have a second chance.
To bring this series full circle, I ask "Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?”
(Although, in some instances having a second chance would ruin a hilarious website.)
How picturing chairs affects your ability to schedule a meeting (part 2)
If you missed last post take a moment to read that. It is cool, we will wait.
Okay now that we are all caught up, the question is how
is it that imagining a simple action have an impact on the way we understand
time?
If you were like me it took me a while to figure it out in my head to make sense, but here is what I got.
Imagine you are pulling the chair toward you:
Conversely if we imagine pulling your self forward along the rope:
The final post in this little series will be an attempt to connect this above study with Christianity. Feel free to make your own connections and leave comments to share.
How picturing chairs affects your ability to schedule a meeting (part 1)
Currently
I am reading I Is
an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way You See the
World by James Geary. If you are a
language nerd then you may like this book.
If you have a PhD in linguistics then this book may be too simple for
you. If you do not completely love the
show “A Way with Words” then this
book might be a bit boring for you.
However,
there are a number of studies in this book that are quite fantastic and this
post is the first of a couple of posts on this particular study on how we embody
time. Here is the study, and you can
play along.
“Participants
looked at a drawing of a chair with a rope attached to it. Half of the subjects
imagined pulling the chair toward themselves with the rope; the other half
imagined sitting in the chair and pulling themselves forward along the rope.”
(If you
are playing along, go ahead and pick one of the groups and imagine accordingly).
“Both
groups then read the statement “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward
two days” and were asked: What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?”
(If you are still playing along, write down
your answer.)
“The
answer to the question “What day is the meeting that has been rescheduled?” is
not obvious, because the concept of “forward” in the context of “the future” is
ambiguous. When the meeting is rescheduled, does it move closer to you or do
you move closer to it?”
If you imagined pulling the chair towards
yourself in the illustration then…
“Participants
who imagined pulling the chair toward themselves more often reported that the
meeting had been moved to Monday, consistent with the metaphorical concept that
time moves events toward them.”
If you imagined pulling yourself forward along
the rope…
“Participants
who imagined pulling themselves along the rope more often reported that the
meeting had been rescheduled to Friday, consistent with the concept that an
event is a stationary object toward which time moves them.”
Did
this match up with you? If you imagined
pulling the chair toward you did you answer Monday? If you imagined pulling yourself along the
rope did you answer Friday?
The
next post will elaborate a bit more on this idea, but wanted to open this up
with you to ponder this question – how is it that imagining a simple action
have an impact on the way we understand time?
Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.