4 Time and Mediation
The temporal issue of mediation leads us to different ways of conceiving time, which will vary depending on the place, age and people considered.
4.1. The time of mediations
In every Western language, time is treated as a continuous flow that includes a past, a present and a future. We may feel like we master time, control it, spend it, win it or waste it, and the “passing of time” process seems real and tangible to us because we can assign a numerical value to it.
According to Edward T. Hall (1914–2009), an anthropologist, time, far from being an unchanging constant as Newton had imagined, is a mixture of concepts, phenomena and rhythms that cover a very large reality. We can say that there are as many different types of time as there are human beings on earth, but Westerners consider time as a unique entity. This is an incorrect way of conceiving time, which does not correspond to anything in reality; thus, we can see a gap between time such as it is lived and time such as it is conceived.
We usually distinguish between different types of time such as holy, secular, metaphysical, physical, biological, etc., but we know practically nothing about how they are organized to form a coherent whole, or how each type of time affects our life.
“Furthermore, there are two categories of time of which Westerners are only partly aware. We are all linked to one another through a web of numberless rhythms: for example, those that influence the relations between parents ...