Polytemporal Worlds — The Scales of Becoming: 1 The Plurality of Time — Many Rhythms of Becoming

The myth of singular time is one of modern thought’s most enduring simplifications. It presumes that all processes unfold within a single, universal flow — a shared metric that orders every event from the motion of galaxies to the beating of hearts. But life, meaning, and relation do not move to one clock. The world is polytemporal.

Every system keeps time differently. A cell oscillates in milliseconds, a forest in decades, a culture in centuries, a language across epochs. None of these scales can be reduced to another; each is a rhythm of coherence sustained within its own relational horizon. Time, in this sense, is not what systems occupy — it is what they generate through coordination, repetition, and renewal.

To live, then, is to participate in multiple times at once. The pulse of the body meets the cycles of the planet; the tempo of thought drifts against the tempo of speech; the rhythm of cultural transformation stretches far beyond the span of individual lives. The self is not an inhabitant of time but a site of temporal intersection — a resonance pattern among overlapping durations.

The modern imagination, however, has long flattened this multiplicity. The clock, the calendar, and the timeline were technologies of synchronisation: tools that made collective action possible by suppressing temporal diversity. They enabled coordination at vast scales — trade, governance, industry — but at the cost of temporal ecology. Under this regime, other rhythms became noise.

Recovering the plurality of time means recovering the richness of relation. A relational world is one in which different tempos coexist without needing to conform — where coherence emerges not from uniformity but from resonance among rhythms. Harmony, in this sense, is not synchrony but mutual audibility: each process finding its own phase within the living polyphony of becoming.

This view transforms how we understand continuity and change. What we call “history” is not a single unfolding narrative but a superposition of asynchronous developments — a counterpoint of beginnings and endings, accelerations and pauses, that together sustain the world’s ongoing renewal.

To live polytemporally is to learn to hear those layers again: to feel the slow time of stone beneath the fast time of thought; to sense how cultural memory lags behind technological transformation; to recognise that every act of creation joins a rhythm already in motion.

There is no one time — only relations finding their own duration. The universe, heard rightly, is a composition of tempos still tuning themselves toward coherence.