Is time a flat circle? The concept of time as a flat circle is that instead of living our lives linearly, one minute after the next towards eternity, we repeat everything over and over again. This is an idea from the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that received attention a few years ago due to the TV show, True Detective, season one: “Someone once told me that time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over again.” It’s a concept Nietzsche called eternal recurrence.
There are some people in the world who see this as if a glass half empty and contemplate a life reliving the worst of our experiences, like loss. There are others who see this as getting the opportunity to re-experience the best things in life, like love. Anyway, contemplating this can lead to existential discomfort so be warned.
I wobble back and forth across the borders of the glass half full/empty in my day to day experience. When I’m at my best I think the glass just is, neither full nor empty. I think I first picked this concept up from Taoism as illustrated in the lovely tome, The Tao of Pooh, which says, “While Eeyore frets … and Piglet hesitates … and Rabbit calculates … and Owl pontificates …Pooh just is.” I was 13, it was formative.
Taoism also views time as cyclical as opposed to linear. My (limited) understanding is that linear time has only existed since human consciousness created a concept of time and measured it by the sky. True time is ‘cosmological’ time but if you want to know more about that, I’m going to pass you off to this cool article by David Chai, PhD where he says, “The Dao operates in the time of non-time and resides in the space of non-space.” Mind blown.
I’ll just be over here trying to be economical with my time and give it structure by doing tasks and whatnot.
Allsfaire Design 
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