balanced time perspective

Clock constructed in 1390 at Wells Cathedral

What is balanced time perspective? and why is it wyrd and highly strange? Well you may ask!

Balanced time perspective is...

the often nonconscious process whereby the continual flows of personal and social experiences are assigned to temporal categories, or time frames, that help to give order, coherence, and meaning to those events. (Zimbardo and Boyd)

Some of us lean more into the past, some into the future, and some are firmly fixed on the present. (Which are you? Or are you something else?) A balanced time perspective takes into account all three periods and is not skewed toward a negative bias or an unrealistic positive bias.

And then there is the flavor of these leaning tendencies. If we have had a difficult past, we may tend to recollect memories and feel sad or angry or powerless. If we worry about the future, there is fretting and anxiety and a tendency to plan, plan, plan. Some of us feel the present in a flow state and may feel that we live in a state of intuitive knowing.

None of this is bad, but it is helpful to be more aware of our own tendencies. In Zimbardo and Boyd's book, The Time Paradox, and on the accompanying website, you can take the authors' time perspective test that reveals any biases you may have.

But many of us see time extending beyond the dates of our birth and death. Past lives. Future lives. However you conceive of those. Our beliefs affect our experience, so wouldn't it be nice to know more about this? Voila! The Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory!

Why think about all this and/or take those tests? Our psychological health depends in part upon our time perspective.

Julia Mossbridge speaks to this in the segment below. (Stay tuned for some more of Julia's work in future posts!)