Sustainability is impossible with linear time-lines. So learn to use a circular calendar.

Using a circular calendar has significantly enhanced my personal and professional life, both of which are committed to sustainability and regeneration. If everyone seeking sustainable living shifted to using cyclical calendars, we would be much closer to a sustainable culture. Organizations promoting sustainability can show significant leadership.

Lyla June Johnson, an Indigenous environmental scientist, educator, and poet of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages from Taos, New Mexico, says:

“A linear society that thinks in terms of ‘cradle to grave’ will have an endpoint. It won’t be sustained. However, a culture that thinks cyclically and reinvests all ‘waste’ into its livelihood will continue like a circle, it will never end.”

Sustainability leaders know the importance of living in accordance with Earth’s cycles. However, while much attention has been put on closer connections with land and water (space), we seem to have forgotten the importance of time.

Linearity may be the opposite of sustainability.

Linearity — linear GDP growth, linear timelines, linear progress, linear and causal ways of thinking that *barely* work for a simple world and certainly do not function for a complex or wicked world — has a lot of well-documented problems attached to it. The reason is simple: our world is not linear.

Our world is composed of cycles within and around cycles. Earth herself is a tilted, imperfect sphere orbiting our Sun in an imperfect (slightly oval-shaped) circle; our solar system orbits around the center of the spiral of the Milky Way Galaxy, which has a 100,000 light-year diameter.

Part of what we have forgotten — we can blame colonization for this, though there are other sources of confusion — is that to live in harmony on this planet, we need to live according to the way it actually works. The rhythym of the year — especially the cycles of the seasons — are closely connected to Earth’s rotation around the sun.

Obvious? Yes. But this is not reflected in our calendar system, which presents time as a straight line with boxes — your calendar or planner.

Returning to Cyclical Time

I use the term “cyclical temporal technologies” to refer to the wider variety of ways humans chart time and space across cultures and traditions. These include calendars, sun dials, and other time-keeping devices, from Stonehenge to the Mayan calendar to the Chinese lunar calendar.

Circular Calendars and Sustainability: In Practice

Inspired by a mystical experience nearly four years ago, I have been developing, using, and teaching a variation of a cyclical temporal technology, a simple circular calendar for several years to people keen on creating sustainable cultures.

When I start people in working with circular calendars, I use them to support reflection, evaluation, assessment, and strengthening people’s sense of purpose, belonging, and devising the categories that are most important to them and their communities. I subsequently use them for planning, individual and collective meaning making, and strategy. Those students who are midwives, herbalists, gardeners, farmers, foresters, land stewards, healers and in other ways are actively involved with the life cycle of plants, find these simple technologies immensely valuable.

Here are what I find to be the major benefits that I and my students, clients, and fellow cyclical time enthusiasts gain from this:

1. Deeper connection to our local ecosystems, and recognizing how they and their organizations are connected to their particular ecosystem(s)
2. From which arises increased capacity for climate adaptation at a local level
3. Clearer sense of purpose
4. Greater capacity to rest — and to see what are the existing and natural spaces of rest/ fallow time/down time, and to design their year with that in mind.
5. Stronger community: Time is communal. As much as possible we do this as a communal activity, which helps the sense of shame, fear, anxiety and distress that often accompanies people’s relationship to time.
6. Increased sense of the sacredness of time — including the precariousness of this particular moment in human history and a sense of presence.
7. Multi-dimensional evaluation: it is easy, with these models, to look at ecological, economic, and social dimensions
8. Sensing patterns — Described by Meg Wheatley and others as a cornerstone to enable sustainable organizations in a chaotic universe, I always find that our cyclical calendar systems are helpful in this way.

We are all circling through space-time.

This year, as you reflect on the craziness and the ups and the downs and all you learned and all you didn’t do and all that no one did and all that you did do, are you going to use an inherently unsustainable linear system?

Or are you going to use a calendar system that moves you into greater alignment with the motion of Earth herself?