Reflection: Your Relationship to Time

Prompts to consider

• Think about your experience of time in different states. Time in flow states (absorbed in work, sport, or creativity). Time in boredom or anxiety. Time in grief. Time in joy. Does the clock measure these experiences equally, even though they feel radically different in length and texture? What does the variability of experienced time tell you about whether Bergson is right that duration is irreducible to measured time?
• Bergson's cone model: the past is not stored and retrieved but preserved in its entirety and partially actualized in the present. Think about the way your past genuinely inhabits your present experience right now, not as explicit memories but as the background of your perception, your expectations, your emotional tone. Can you feel the cone pressing forward? Does the idea that the whole of your past is somehow 'there', just less actualized, resonate with your experience, or does it seem wrong?
• The elan vital claims that life has an irreducible tendency toward creative novelty that mechanism alone cannot account for. This is a claim about biology, but also about your own life. Do you experience your own development as genuinely creative, as the production of something new that was not determined by prior causes? Or does your honest introspection suggest that what feels like creativity is actually the unfolding of prior causes? And does it matter which is true for how you live?