Rethinking Time

How we think about when.

How do you think about time? It’s a simple question, but the answer draws on a vast assortment of ideas: history, destiny, astronomy, astrology, rates of change, entropy, movement, rhythm, language, music, lifetimes, and so on. There’s an abundance of writing about time. It’s the most-used noun in the English language. However, given all this knowledge, there is still a very common, very familiar temporal feature that we take for granted: our calendar.

x-ray image of a human skull in cross section. In the centre of the skull is a classic, spring-wound, two-bell alarm clock.

the Pope’s Calendar

Namely, the Gregorian Calendar, which has become our global calendar. The second is the official international time standard, however, the Gregorian is in official use in all of the world’s nations except for Nepal, Ethiopia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Granted, it is used in conjunction with other calendars in many places, but when it comes to collaborating on the global stage, the Gregorian serves as default, as the result of centuries of Roman, Christian, European, USAmerican colonisation.  What I don’t think we fully realise is the level of harm it causes.

It severs our connection to our natural sense of the day, Moon, seasons, disrupting the rhythm with the leap year and daylight savings. We no longer look to the lights in the sky for our stories, as points of reference to our terrestrial location. The rotation of the Earth, the Moon’s orbit, and the Earth’s orbit define our biological sense of time, and as that rhythm is older than life on Earth, it is essential. Look at the Gregorian: the day and the year are natural phenomena, and although it tracks the Moon to calculate the date for Easter, it doesn’t observe a lunar month. The Moon is in the same phase for everyone, more or less, whereas the day and year vary a great deal depending on where one lives on the world.

In addition to the ghost of the Moon, the Gregorian is cognitively harmful in a number of ways:

  • it uses four incompatible numbering systems
  • its semesters, terms, quarters, months, and weeks don’t synch with any natural phenomena
  • the months, quarters, terms, and semesters are of varying duration
  • the leap year rule is disruptive and no longer accurate
  • the names of the months are meaningless anachronisms
  • it’s  counter-intuitive, and difficult to anticipate
analog clock face with the hands at 10:10, however, it's only a guess as all the numbers lie in a pile at the bottom.

Calendar Reform, Decolonizing Time

There are increased calls for calendar reform, and there are a number of compelling proposals. However, most of them seek to either adjust the Gregorian to address one or more of its issues, typically the number of days in the month, or to introduce another global calendar.

I don’t think a global calendar is the solution. I think a system that mediates between calendars would be a better approach.

Individuals, communities, nations are free to use whichever system is most meaningful, and the global mediation system would make it possible to translate between others as needed. Granted, there are calendar translator apps, which are invaluable, however, they fall short in helping us understand how calendars work.

theAbysmal Calendar is a global mediation system derived from our current Universal Coordinated Time model, as well as a series of experimental or novel calendars, which take advantage of the symmetries of the day, Moon, year, the complementary seasons of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, to create as many regular measures within the 365 day year as possible.

For an introduction: Calendar Building Step by Step

main page: theAbysmal Calendar

cross-like symbol made of lines with circles at key intersections. The lines form five boxes, one at centre and four adjacent. Each of the four adjacent squares has a triangle attached opposite the centre square. THe four arms are coloured blue at bottom, green at left, yellow at top, red at right. The circle at centre is a double black and white spiral. In addition, there are 20 other circles.