Had one of those brief “so, how’s your PhD going?” conversations at Henley at the end of a PD workshop today and, wanting to express my interest in the topic of time, began to try to explain George Mead’s ideas on time and narrative, and how it’s not the past that constructs the present, but the other way round.
For me, it’s this: the future consists of contingencies in the present, and so does the past. In other words, the past can and does change depending on our sense of coherence about the connections between the present and the future. This is quite a different view than what most people would think it “so”. Time is not a thing separate from us, it is created by us through our narratives.
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