![]() When we are constantly moving forward, we build momentum and can maintain our momentum even through difficult times. Momentum: Perpetual forward motion creates momentum, which can propel us towards our goals and help us achieve them faster.When we set goals and work towards them consistently, we experience a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, which can improve our overall well-being. Achievement: Perpetual forward motion can lead to a greater sense of achievement and satisfaction.By always pushing forward, we learn to navigate through challenges and setbacks, building our strength and resilience along the way. Resilience: Perpetual forward motion fosters resilience and the ability to adapt to change.When we stop moving forward, we risk stagnation and becoming complacent, which can be detrimental to our development. Progress and Growth: Perpetual forward motion allows us to continuously progress and grow, both personally and professionally.While it may seem like an exhausting concept, there are several compelling reasons why perpetual forward motion could be a desirable state: All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.īy clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set.Perpetual forward motion refers to the idea of continuously moving forward, without ever stopping or slowing down. James Geary’s book I Is An Other looks at how greatly we rely on metaphor to make sense of the world around us – indeed, it even helps determine what we see in the first article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and Wouldn’t that be the wisest approach, going forward? Read this But it’s worth remembering also that they’re only metaphors. We probably can’t abandon these metaphors, and besides, they are useful. So treating time as if you own it is a recipe for stress. But as the blogger David Cain points out, we never really have time: “The time we ‘have’ is never where we are, and we can never see it, unlike anything else we have.” Any number of things might disrupt your plans, and eventually death certainly will. After all, mortgage notwithstanding, I really do own my physical space it’s up to me how I use it. Such metaphors also trick us into thinking we control time more than we do. There’s just you, in this moment of time, and all you can do is use it as best you can. There is no container and thus no need to fret about whether it’ll prove big enough. ( The anthropologist Edward Hall once said that Americans see time as an endless conveyor belt, carrying bottles that must be filled if one passes by unfilled, time’s been wasted.) When you stop and notice that’s just a metaphor, it’s liberating. Take busyness: for me, the feeling of overwhelm is bound up with a sense of time as a physical container, too small for the tasks I need to cram in. Which is a pity, in a way, because I’m pretty sure it makes our experience of time more anguished than it needs to be. Your specific images may not match mine, but anthropologists suggest that the basic metaphor – “time is space” – is a cultural universal. Ask me about the coming month and I can’t help picturing a sequence of little boxes, like a calendar ask me what I did yesterday and my eyes shoot upwards, as I consult a “space” somewhere behind my head. But sighted people do, which makes sense: the space up ahead is in front of our eyes, while the space behind takes effort to see.Īll of which is a reminder of how odd it is that we think of time using spatial metaphors at all – indeed, that it seems virtually impossible not to. (No doubt they can talk this way as well as anyone the study was designed to elicit instinctive associations.) Nor do they think of an event in two months’ time as “closer” than one two months ago. And a new study from Italy, reported on the Research Digest blog, adds an intriguing detail: it found that Italians who have been blind since birth or early childhood don’t generally conceive of the past as behind them, or the future in front. The Aymara people of the Andes see the future behind them and the past in front some rural Papuans see the future lying uphill. Yet most people, I have learned, actually think that this means holding the meeting sooner, metaphorically pulling it forward towards them. With my dying breath, I’ll maintain that this means moving it into the future, forward along the timeline I picture projecting into the distance from where I’m standing. W e talk about time in confusing ways – as anyone who’s ever tried to move a meeting with me “forward” a few days will be able to testify.
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