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There is no subject more intriguing than time, and time is so much stranger and more dynamic than the clocks, deadlines, goals, and schedules we live by. In this third offering of ways of seeing and living that have emerged across two decades of On Being, we explore manifold understandings of how time works, and how change happens, that animate lives of wisdom and grace. Deep time. Kairos time. The “200-year present.” The quality of “critical yeast” before and after critical mass. 

We step into this mystery: a long view of time has a power to replenish our sense of ourselves and the world. It renews us to turn back to the raw materials of our lives in the here and now.

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Consider having a journal nearby as you listen. Return to the prompts below, if you’re so inclined, and take them as companions in pondering and living in the days ahead. Maybe invite someone(s) to join you.

Ponder:

Map your 200-year present as an entry point to sinking into time’s capaciousness. It begins with the year of the birth of the oldest person you knew when you were a child, and joins with the hundredth birthday of the youngest person you have held in your arms. For most of us, that’s going to be about two centuries that touch our lives directly and that we directly touch.

Practice:

What does it mean, might it mean, for you to be critical yeast in your world of friendship, work, kinship, community? Live the question. Are you part of yeasty “small groups of people in unlikely combinations, in a new quality of relationship”? Where to begin?

This is all another way to talk about planting and growing the generative story of our time: in a noisy, hyper-reactive world, fermenting a “quiet before.”

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Twitter: @kristatippett

Email: artofliving@onbeing.org