Meet the Giant Everything

(aka The Thief of Time, Attention, and Imagination)

The Giant Everything is the name we give to those 11 million "things" that occupy our days, consume our attention, deracinate our imagination, and diminish our sense of possibility. 

These "things" can be great or small. They can be things to do, things not to do, meetings, appointments, parties, things to fix, things to not fix, people to meet, people to avoid, happy events, sad ones, meetings, parties, disasters, catastrophes, climate change, existential dread, joy, sorrow, things we want to do, things we don't, celebrations, resignations, grocery lists, laundry lists, list of lists, and the list goes on.

The truth is that The Giant Everything has a hard time keeping track of So. Many. Things.

Where Does All the Time Go? The Vast Underworld of the Overwhelmed

The Vast Underworld of Overwhelmed (aka where The Great Everything often spends the most time) is very, very crowded. Thus, The Giant Everything steals bits of your time and attention. After all, all those things have to go somewhere so The Giant Everything uses your available attention like a little storage locker and steals your time as well: a minute, a moment, a day, a lifetime.

You might not even know this is happening. It can take the form of distraction: have you ever walked into a room and have no idea why you got there? That is likely because The Giant Everything snatched a bit of your attention.

Perennially preoccupied by world events? So too is The Giant Everything, thus The Giant Everything thinks you won't notice just a little more overwhelm.

When you find yourself unable to pay attention? It is not you. It is just The Giant Everything. When that space is being occupied by The Giant Everything, the consequences can be profound because...

That space, where time, attention, and imagination come together, is where a sense of possibility is born. 

Thus, the challenge is that The Giant Everything steals more than your time, attention, and imagination. It steals your sense of possibility.

It's not just you. Really.

Trying to keep track of The Giant Everything impacts all of us. There are so many things competing for our time and attention.

Want some horrifying stats that might make you feel better or at least less alone and understand a few reasons why you might feel dragged down into the Underworld of Overwhelmed?

• Did you know that the average human attention span has dwindled to 8.25 seconds. 
• Each day on Earth we generate more than 500 million tweets, 347.3 billion, 4 million petabytes of Facebook data, more than 65 billion WhatsApp messages and more than 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube. 
• There are very real threats. According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) specifies that there has been a 35% increase in natural disasters since just 1990 and according to the UN, in 2016, more countries experienced violent conflict than at any point in almost 30 years.
• Add to this the content and concerns generated by our own lives: work, family, volunteering, chores, relationships, school, taking care of ourselves and others and just all the work required to maintain our lives.

You might feel like your attention is irrevocably fragmented. You might feel like you can't take the time for things that matter to you. You might find that you don't have the time to help yourself, to help others. And yet, the world needs a lot of help. A LOT.

Yet finding the fortitude to reclaim your attention from The Giant Everything might seem like TOO MUCH.

You might think, "why bother?" the world is a mess anyway. In the face of The Giant Everything, it can all feel impossible because...

When time is limited, and our attention so compromised, it is no wonder that our collective imagination and sense of possibility suffers.

Yet to create a world worth a damn, that sense of possibility is essential. And this is precisely why The Human Imagination Project exists: to help us reclaim that sense of possibility.

The Human Imagination Project Vs. The Giant Everything

We want to people snatch their time and attention back from the gaping maw of The Giant Everything so that we can reclaim our collective imagination and use that to imagine, create, and enact new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and for the world.

We want this to be a space to imagine, to dream, to do, to discover.

We want to help you reclaim your time, attention, and imagination, in order to reconnect to what matters to you. Because, when you are attending to your time and attention, it makes it that much harder for The Great Everything to steal those very things from you.

And we know that it is a big job to pay attention to everything. It takes a lot of time. We know The Great Everything is just trying to help us and protect us. Thus, if we get better at aligning our time and attention with our intention, well it helps The Great Everything not have so many things to worry about.

Want to reclaim your time, attention, and imagination? Try Timefulness.

We believe one of the most powerful ways to do this is through practicing timefulness. Timefulness aligns your time, attention, and imagination so that you can be fully present.

But First...A Short History of Timefulness

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, some of the earliest known uses of the word timeful occurred in the late 1300s. It was used to mean "early in the season" as well as "consisting of or occupying time; occurring at a particular moment in time; temporal, durational. Also: requiring much time, time-intensive." Later the word was used to mean "seasonable, opportune, well-timed" or "that moves in time with a rhythm". Timefulness, in the sense of "the quality or state of being timeful or in time; timeliness" made its appearance around the 1890s Despite the array of rich meanings expressed by the word, it fell into disuse and when the word re-merged in recent decades, it had taken on a new meaning that incorporates mindfulness practices and being connected to the present AND the grand sweep of time.

So What Is Timefulness?

Being present for the fullness of time.

We incorporate elements of mindfulness practices, applied improvisation, and storytelling. Mindfulness and applied improvisation because they are powerful tools to help you access different ways to experience the world, and storytelling because it helps you make sense of, and even re-imagine the world.

And to be perfectly clear, timefulness is NOT about time management. It's time re-imaginement

We teach the art and practice of timefulness through writing, speaking, online courses, workshops, and other creative interventions.

Who Might Benefit from Timefulness?

If you feel overwhelmed, distracted.

Maybe you feel you never have enough time.

Maybe you feel like you have enough time but that time is not timeful in a way that is meaningful to you.

You don't want another god-forsaken, mindless, "productivity" program our course that add more miserable track the incessant treadmill of getting stuff done.

You want to heal your attention, reclaim your time, reconnect to your imagination.You want to have the time FOR your life.

How Do I Participate?

We will be rolling out our new website/platform this month. Yay!

Here you will have access to our courses, workshops, micro-art interventions and an array of interesting resources, activities, and other stuff to help you get the most from your time.

One of our signature programs, 🚀 Eleven Minutes to Mars, helps you re-imagine your relationship with time and attention in eleven minute increments, for an eleven day sprint.

Our next co-hort launches on March 20th and tomorrow we will be sharing more details tomorrow, in the meantime, you can find out more here.