Circular time vs. linear time - Austin Kleon

Author Katherine May on the seasons of life:

“We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and... See more

Form, in music, is inherently temporal. It gives some shape to time, or at least designates the pace and manner at which we move through a particular piece. Where do we fare forward or cycle back; which moments expand, and which contract? Likewise, memory — that most universal and yet individual of temporal structures — lends form and shape to expe... See more

What if we could embody a different relationship with time ? If we took other images from our world - spirals, zig-zags, rhizomes, crystals, the folds of a midnight flower, the pulsing undulations of the jellyfish - and allowed our narratives of becoming and transformation (personal or otherwise) to follow those contours and weaves, those meta patt... See more

- “On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.”