Buds appearing early… leading to reflections on attitude to time and punctuality

As I walked this morning I noticed the buds appearing on the trees.

It was a treat to see them in the depths of winter but also made me reflective as I wondered how nature would ‘cope’ with them appearing so early.

And it brought me back (later in this post) on a reflective conversation I had on Friday with a friend from North Africa on the Western perception of time and timeliness that is received wisdom.

I believe that the bud appears in response to the milder weather. If it gets colder I believe it will stop or die back. It will continue to grow if the weather is mild. The key point is that it will respond to the feedback from the weather (and probably many other feedback mechanisms of which I have no clue). It doesn’t ‘know’ there is a Winter which is supposed to be a certain temperature and produce buds at the same time each year.

Nature doesn’t have a clock. It does have rhythms and cycles that have evolved over billions of years. These make it very resilient. Not in the sense that it shrugs off ‘abnormal’ events but that it it responds and adapts to these events. Over time, these adaptations will make it even more resilient.

This brings me back to my reflection on the Western perspective of time. In general, being prompt and being on time is perceived as of high value. Judgement is often applied when someone is not on time. (read more about this from the google search I conducted on the Western sense of time and punctuality).

Nature helps me here by giving me a source of ‘universal truth’ and helps me compare different approaches to time without risking a racially charged conversation about ‘African time’.

So a friend I mentioned to at the weekend said

But how else could we manage things?

So there are a few hints or guidelines avaiable that I have harvested:

As my friend said, the meeting with you is what I value. This meeting will happen because I value it. If I (or you) didn’t value our meeting or not as much, it may well not happen.

Looking at nature the meeting may not need to happen now. Perhaps there is some feedback happening that tells us that it should happen but today is the wrong day.

At the moment, many people attend meetings because they are in the work diary. They may find them a waste of their time. But they know how they would be perceived if they didn’t attend them. Or suspect they would be perceived if they didn’t attend. Why are we so worried? Can we not trust our colleagues? (a whole different area of exploration!)

So we continue to attend these meetings. During covid-19 meetings were set up that were critical and valuable because the emergency demanded it. Things got done quickly and the existing meetings that were supposed to control things were bypassed or simply ignored.

So we’ve been trained to go to meetings and be punctual. Even, it would seem, if there is no value to the meeting. So who is in charge here? This behaviour feels very mechanistic, inhuman and unnatural.

The humans don’t appear to be in charge. We’ve created machines which are now in charge of us.

I will continue to look to nature to find the answers that it provides.