Chapter 16: What the Aymara Know

In the Andes of South America, the Aymara people have a relationship with time that would seem backwards to most Westerners. For them, the past is in front. The future is behind.

This isn't a quirk of phrasing. It's reflected in their gestures. When an Aymara speaker refers to the past, they gesture forward, toward what's visible. When they refer to the future, they gesture behind them, toward what can't be seen. The logic is elegant: the past is known, therefore visible, therefore in front of you. The future is unknown, therefore invisible, therefore behind you.

In English, we do the opposite. We face the future. We put the past behind us. We "look forward" to things. We "move on." Our entire temporal orientation is forward-leaning, future-focused, perpetually reaching for what comes next.

In Mandarin, time moves vertically. "Last week" is literally "up one week." "Next week" is "down one week." Studies using functional brain imaging show that Mandarin speakers actually activate different neural pathways when thinking about time compared to English speakers. The language doesn't just describe time differently. It organises the brain's processing of time differently.

These aren't anthropological curiosities. They're evidence that the way you think about time is not fixed. It's culturally constructed, linguistically reinforced, and, potentially, changeable.

A 2025 study found that cyclical time concepts, thinking of time as seasons, cycles, and recurring patterns rather than as a line moving in one direction, change how people assess risk and perceive the future. People primed with cyclical time concepts saw the future as more predictable and felt less anxious about unlikely risks. Linear time priming produced the opposite: a sense of urgency, of irreversibility, of time running out.

Most Westerners live inside linear time without realising it's a choice. Time is a line. It moves forward. What's spent is gone. The future is a resource that's shrinking. This framing produces a particular emotional register: scarcity, urgency, acceleration. If time is a line and it's running out, then of course it feels like it's speeding up. The line is getting shorter.

But what if you held both perspectives? What if time were both a line and a cycle? What if you could feel the forward motion of your life and also feel the recurrence? Seasons come back. Skills deepen through repetition. Relationships evolve in spirals, revisiting the same themes at new levels. Your children go through phases that echo your own childhood. The garden you plant each spring is different and the same.

Cyclical time doesn't deny mortality. It doesn't pretend the future is infinite. It adds a layer of depth to the linear experience. It says: yes, time moves forward. And also, patterns recur. And within those recurrences, there's an opportunity for deeper engagement each time around.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this: kairos. As opposed to chronos, which is measured, quantitative time, one hour equalling every other hour, kairos is qualitative time. The right moment. The moment that carries weight. Chronos is the clock on the wall. Kairos is the instant when something shifts.

Kairos was depicted as a young man, swift and winged, with a single lock of hair on an otherwise bald head. If you were paying attention, you could seize him by the hair as he passed. If you weren't, he was gone. The image is telling. Kairos moments aren't scheduled. They're recognised. They require a quality of attention that most of us have stopped practising.

Seneca, writing in Rome in 49 CE, made what remains the sharpest diagnosis of why life feels short. It's not that we have a short time to live, he argued, but that we waste a great deal of it. Life is long enough for the person who manages it properly. He catalogued the ways we give time away: to ambition, to busyness without purpose, to vice and distraction, to the service of other people's agendas. And, most cutting: to the perpetual postponement of actually living. "I'll start living after this project. After this promotion. After the kids are older."

Two thousand years later, the diagnosis is identical. The specifics have changed. The screens are different. The distractions are different. But the pattern is the same. We defer the feeling of aliveness to a future that never quite arrives.

What the Aymara, the Greeks, and Seneca all knew, in their different ways, is that your relationship with time is not given. It's constructed. By your culture, your language, your habits, your attention, and your choices. And if it's constructed, it can be reconstructed.

You probably can't rewire your brain to think of the past as in front of you, though it's an interesting thought experiment. But you can become aware that the linear, forward-leaning, scarcity-driven time orientation you live inside is one option among many. And within that awareness, there's room to hold time differently.

To notice kairos when it arrives. To feel the cyclical alongside the linear. To stop deferring aliveness to a future date.

The Aymara face the past because it's the only thing you can see clearly. There's a wisdom in that. The past, fully absorbed and richly remembered, is what gives the present its depth.