Is the future ahead of us and the past behind us? Not at all necessary. It turns out that in different cultures the concept of time is significantly different.
The past is behind us, and the future is ahead of us? Not necessary. The American psychologist Lera Boroditsky suggested that the Australian aborigines put in order photos of a person in his youth, maturity and old age. Americans and Europeans do it from left to right, but for the natives, the past is always at sunrise and the future is always in the west. If they sat facing north, then they laid out the pictures from right to left, if they were facing west, then vertically, away from themselves. It happens even more unexpectedly: in the northern dialects of the Chinese language, the future is at the bottom, and the past is at the top. And in the language of the Aymara Indians, the future is behind, and the past is ahead (after all, we generally know the past, but we do not see the future – which means, perhaps, it is behind our backs) … In other words, in different cultures, ideas about time are different. Perhaps this is a chance for us, when we lose our bearings in an unclear situation, to look at it differently. And to discover some other, unexpected meaning in the usual picture of the world.