Living Between Arrows: On the Asymmetric Nature of Time
We talk about time like it's money. We spend it, budget it, invest it, waste it. Someone's "living on borrowed time" like they took out a payday loan from the universe. This isn't just a metaphor we happen to use — it's a whole framework that industrial capitalism installed in our heads, and honestly, it probably misrepresents our actual experience of time.
Before factory whistles and punch clocks, time was less fungible. A farmer's day bent to seasons and weather, not hours. You couldn't rush the drying of paint or the curing of leather — the work had its own timeline. But once labor became hourly, time became granular, measurable, exchangeable. It became something to anxiously account for, something you could waste.
And here we are, treating every day like a transaction we need to get returns on.
But what if this whole framework just... misunderstands how change actually happens?
The Bow and the Arrow
Think about drawing a bow. You pull the string back, and for these long moments, all your effort goes into creating tension. Your muscles strain. Nothing moves forward. If someone's tracking only forward progress, this looks like you're going backwards. The arrow is literally moving away from the target.
Then you release, and suddenly all that apparent stagnation becomes flight.
The arrow doesn't fly because of the moment of release. It flies because of everything that came before — all that accumulated tension, that period of drawn-out (sorry) apparent stillness. The energy was building the entire time.
Most meaningful changes in our lives work like this. You study for years before something clicks. You have dozens of awkward conversations before you figure out how to actually listen. A writer types thousands of mediocre words before writing one good sentence. (I'm hoping this isn't one of the mediocre ones, but statistically, you know.)
The problem is that while we're drawing the bow — in those long stretches of no visible progress — we're haunted by the transactional model of time. Every day without advancement feels like waste. We get anxious, doubtful. Maybe we're on the wrong path entirely. Maybe we should try something else. Maybe we're not cut out for this.
The Actual Difference Between Drawing and Drifting
Okay, but here's where it gets tricky: not all periods of apparent stagnation are created equal. Sometimes you're drawing the bow. Sometimes you're just... standing there holding a bow, not really doing anything.
How do we tell the difference?
The draw feels specific. You're working on something defined, even if the outcome is unclear. You're learning this language, reading these books, having these conversations, building this thing. There's a direction to it, even if you can't see the target yet.
Drift feels vague. You're kind of doing... things? But if someone asked you what you're working toward, you'd have to think about it. Or you'd give an answer that feels like something you're supposed to say rather than something you actually feel.
The draw is tiring in a particular way. You're exhausted at the end of the day, but it's the exhaustion of effort. Something happened, even if you can't name it. You built new calluses (literal or metaphorical), formed new neural pathways, pushed against something real.
Drift is tiring differently. It's the exhaustion of avoidance, of low-level anxiety, of not quite facing something you need to face. You're tired but you didn't really do anything. (We've all had these days. Weeks. Months, if we're being honest. Years? Okay that’s tough.)
The draw accumulates. Each session builds on the last. There's a compounding effect, even if it's invisible. You're getting reps in. Your skills are forming, your understanding is deepening, your capacity is growing.
Drift dissipates. Nothing carries over. You're not actually building toward anything, so there's nothing to compound. You could swap today with yesterday and it wouldn't matter.
The hardest part is that sometimes you can't tell which one you're in until later. You might think you're drawing when you're drifting, or vice versa. The only real test is time, which is deeply annoying from a practical standpoint.
Getting Your Reps In
Sometimes the work is just showing up.
You sit at your desk. Hands on the keyboard. You don't have a specific thing to build today, no clear task, no deadline. But you sit there anyway. You do the thing the way it should be done. With integrity — not in the moralistic sense, but in the structural sense. True to what the work actually is, true to yourself.
This feels almost absurdly simple, but it's also kind of the whole thing?
Some days something happens. Some days nothing happens. But the days when nothing happens aren't wasted — they're reps. They're maintaining the draw. They're keeping yourself in the space where work occurs so that when the moment comes, when the phase transition happens, when the arrow needs to fly, you're actually there. Your hands are already on the bow.
Maybe you sit down not knowing what to build, and your hands start moving. Not because you figured out The Plan, but because you're in the habit of building, and the building itself reveals what wants to be built.
The work has its own logic. But you have to show up enough to hear it. (Think it doesn’t apply to you? Think again. Even as a startup founder, just sitting there at your scheduled time is the opening salvo for flow.)
Energy Management (Or: You Can't Draw Forever)
Here's something the bow metaphor reveals that the money metaphor obscures: you cannot maintain draw indefinitely.
Try it. Actually try to hold a drawn bow for an hour. Your muscles will give out. The tension isn't sustainable. You either release the arrow or you collapse.
This is where we get into energy management, and why the "always be hustling" mentality is not just wrong but physically impossible. Human beings are not machines with consistent output. We're more like... I don't know, waves? We build, we crest, we release, we recover.
The time between arrows isn't wasted time. It's necessary time. You have to collect more arrows. You have to let your muscles recover. You have to assess whether you hit what you were aiming at (did you even have a target?), adjust your aim, maybe move to a different position entirely.
The problem is that in a culture that treats time as money, recovery looks like waste. Rest feels like you're falling behind. So we try to maintain draw constantly, which leads to one of two outcomes:
We snap. Burnout isn't poetic languishing. It's your bowstring breaking. It's your arm giving out. It's when your body or mind or both just say "nope, we're done" and you lose months or years to recovery.
We fake the draw. We go through the motions of effort without actually building tension. It looks like we're working, feels like we're working, but nothing's actually accumulating. This might be worse than drift because at least drift is honest about what it is.
Real energy management means recognizing that you're always somewhere in a cycle: drawing, releasing, recovering, re-aiming. The work isn't to stay in draw mode forever. It's to know which phase you're in and what that phase needs.
Living Between Arrows
So let's talk about this in-between time, because honestly, that's where we spend most of our lives.
You've released an arrow. Maybe it hit, maybe it didn't. Now you're in this weird liminal space where you need to assess what happened, recover your energy, figure out your next shot, and possibly even questioning whether you’re even shooting at the right thing.
This is not dead time. This is not waste. But it doesn't feel productive in the way our culture has trained us to value productivity.
The space between arrows is where learning happens. It's where you integrate what just occurred, adjust your understanding, recalibrate. It's also where you rest, which (again) is not optional; it's a prerequisite for being able to draw again.
But here's what makes it psychologically difficult: there's no clear signal for how long this period should last. Rest for a day? A week? A month? When does recovery become avoidance? When does reflection become rumination? When does strategic patience become just... waiting for something to happen?
I don't have a clean answer to this. (Did you expect one? From an essay about how time is weird and non-linear?)
What I do know is that the money model of time makes this phase feel illicit, like you're getting away with something or wasting something precious. But you can't skip it. If you try to draw again before you're ready, you'll either miss wildly or injure yourself. Sometimes both.
The Tyranny of Steady Returns
The money metaphor creates an expectation of steady, compounding returns. Put in your hours, get proportional output. Linear growth. Compound interest.
But human development isn't compound interest. It's not even exponential growth. It's more like phase transitions, the concept from physics where accumulated change suddenly manifests as transformation.
Water stays water stays water until it doesn't. At 99°C, still water. At 100°C, steam. All that heat you added at 60°, 70°, 80° wasn't wasted. It was necessary. But it sure looked like nothing was happening until everything changed at once.
We experience this constantly: the relationship that suddenly clicks after months of uncertainty, the skill that jumps from competent to fluent, the moment disparate pieces of knowledge suddenly form a pattern you can see. They're not lucky breaks, but the release after the long draw, the phase transition after the long accumulation.
Except we've been trained to see the accumulation period as time poorly spent because it's not generating visible returns. We're anxious the whole time: Am I wasting my time? Should I quit? Is anything happening?
(Spoiler: something is probably happening. It just doesn't look like progress yet.)
Reorienting to Kairos
The ancient Greeks had two words for time. Chronos — chronological, sequential time, the kind you measure with clocks. And kairos — the right moment, the opportune time, qualitative rather than quantitative.
We've built a whole civilization around chronos and forgotten kairos exists.
But kairos is real. Ask any athlete about flow states, any artist about when the work suddenly comes together, any entrepreneur about timing, any person who's fallen in love about the moment a look becomes an invitation. These aren't mystical. They're moments when preparation meets opportunity, when the bow-drawing culminates in release.
Like how you feel like nothing is happening, and then opportunity comes pouring over your head all at once. You chug along, then suddenly you get a big break.
Stay ready. You can keep your bow maintained and your aim steady and your muscles conditioned so that when the moment comes, you can actually take the shot.
This requires a different kind of discipline than the chronos model suggests. It’s all about maintaining readiness through long periods of nothing much happening, staying alert to the moment when everything might happen at once.
What This Actually Means (If Anything)
Look, I'm not going to end this with five bullet points for optimizing your relationship with time. That would be exactly the transactional thinking I’m trying to reason my own way out of (lol).
What I will say is this: maybe we could be feel better about the draw periods. The times when we're working hard but nothing visible is happening. The times when we need to rest and recover between efforts. The times when we're not sure if we're building toward something or just drifting.
Maybe the work is learning to tell the difference between the draw and the drift — not perfectly, because that's impossible, but well enough to make adjustments. Noticing when effort feels directed versus when it feels like avoidance. Noticing when rest feels restorative versus when it feels like hiding.
And maybe recognizing that we're always somewhere in the cycle. Drawing, releasing, recovering, re-aiming. The question isn't "am I being productive with my time?" (which is a chronos question, a money question, btw). Maybe it’s more like "what phase am I in, and what does this phase need?"
Time isn't money. It's more like weather — gathering, breaking, moving in patterns we can sense but not control. We don't spend it. We move through it, hopefully with some degree of skill and attention and kindness toward ourselves when we get it wrong.
Which we will. Repeatedly. Because we're shooting arrows in the dark while the target moves, and honestly, that's just what life is.
