What An Amazing Time To Be Alive!?

What does a culture of inquiry mean? It means we have practices in place where we can get under the implicit and explicit assumptions that run our everyday lives. And the benefit is a greater sense of context and meaning – both of which are antidotes to the machine world we live in. With this, we share with your the BreakBread prompt for the month of August as food for inquiry.  Let us know what you come up with!

What an amazing time to be alive!?
What time is it for the world?
What time is it for you?

An amazing time? I suppose it depends on who you’re talking to. One thing for sure, we live in unprecedented times. Consider the enmeshed worlds we live in – governance, economics, environment, technology, culture to name a few. And in our personal lives – each day i feel awe and overwhelm, hope and despair, joy and grief by the opportunities and pace, the challenges and change these entangled worlds offer.

It’s August. Summertime here in the Northern hemisphere. I was reminded by a friend in India that it’s always “summertime” in India. They don’t really have seasons like we do but do have a time when the rains come. The heat here signals a time to slow down for some while for others its intensity and duration are harbingers of climate change and times to come.

August is vacation time for some and time is also for taking. Here in the US many take a few days here and there while some take a couple weeks. Many of our counterparts in Europe, take the entire month of August off and still have vacation time left!

This month’s prompt we invite you to explore time. How do you feel and think about the times in which we’re living? How are you passing time or how is time passing you? Time is both relative and absolute, abstract and definitive, timely and timeless. We live in the past, the future and the now. We feel it, judge it, and are both enslaved and freed by it.

Where are you with respect to the timeline of your life? And what about your relations – those who are older or younger than you? Those who live in different parts of the world? Those who hold different beliefs and customs? For me, it’s lunchtime followed by perhaps naptime.

Martha and i invite you to take some time to think, talk, imagine and dream: what time is it?