For many Westerners, more specifically the driven citizens of the United States of America, time is viewed as a straight line. Our children realize this, consciously or not, early on. They make timelines in school, their classes switch on the hour, their intelligence is measured on a scale. We are born, we come of age during adolescence. We set a goal, we work to achieve success. Birth and death, childhood and adulthood are stages that occur only once. Life is black and white. Separate. The past is the past, the future is the future. Traveling on a straight line, we can only look forwards.

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, might view time as a circle, a spiral, a figure eight. Time has no sharp corners, no harsh edges, no start and no finish. It is fluid. If it's spirituality and true understanding of the self that one...