The Spiral of Time as Lived Potential

Time, in the dominant metaphors of science and culture, is often rendered as a line: a succession of instants, a forward-moving arrow, a thread from birth to death. But such metaphors flatten the living experience of time. They extract it from the pulse of process, the breath of becoming.

In the metamyth we are weaving, time is not a track upon which events are laid like beads on a string. Time is the dimension along which potential unfolds into instance. It is not the container of change; it is the structure of change.

Time, then, is not something we pass through. It is something that lives through us.

Each moment is not a tick of the universal clock but a convergence: of meanings poised to be made, of actions waiting to be actualised. Time is the horizon of becoming—stretched not in equal units but in intensities of possibility. Some instants teem with potential, thick with the pressure of choice. Others are still, echoing with what has already become.

To live time as potential is to feel the present not as a boundary but as a brink. The now is where the wavefront of meaning crests—where the uninstantiated meets the actual, and the world takes shape once again. This is not a clock’s time. It is kairos, the opportune moment. The instance in which meaning finds form.

In this spiral, each turn is not merely a repetition but a recursion. What has come before reshapes what now can be. The past is not behind us—it is enfolded within us, structured into our potentials, echoing through the systems that constrain and enable our becoming. The future is not ahead of us—it is immanent in the folds of the now, drawn out by the paths we do or do not take.

So we might say: time is not the story we tell about change. It is the grammar of becoming.

To live mythically in time is not to escape the temporal but to deepen it. Rituals, dreams, acts of creation—these do not merely mark time; they bend it, saturate it, re-pattern its flows. In mythic time, a single act may resonate across lifetimes. A symbol may hold centuries. A breath may change a world.

And perhaps this is the secret carried by the spiral: that time is not linear, not even cyclical, but recursive. Not endless repetition, nor mere progression—but evolution. Time writes itself anew each turn, yet always in relation to what has already been written.

To live time as potential is to be a participant in this self-writing. To feel the burden and blessing of every moment as both inheritance and invitation. To become a meaner of time.