General Knowledgespeaking topic
In ancient Egypt the year began with the rising of the star Sirius, which announced the flooding of the Nile; their calendar was tied not to an abstraction in the sky but to the breathing of a river. For us, New Year's is a box on a calendar; for them it was life beginning again. Should time be anchored to numbers, or to nature?
— the Egyptian calendar, Sirius and the Nile flood
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- In some communities the idea of 'mine' barely exists on its own; just as a fish in the ocean belongs to no one, the field is held in common. The West finds private property so natural that it can hardly imagine an alternative. Is something being 'yours' a law of nature, or a line humans drew afterwards?
- Why has Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' been staged continuously for four hundred years? Let's talk about the universality of the hesitation in 'To be, or not to be.'
- When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, ten days were 'deleted'; people went to bed on October 4 and woke up on October 15. What happened to the rent, the birthdays, the debts that fell on those days? If time is an agreement, can ten days really be voted out of existence?
- The Amondawa people of the Amazon have no abstract word for 'time'; nobody wonders how old they are, because they do not even have a calendar of counted years. So if you stopped measuring time, would it actually slow down, or did we invent it and handcuff ourselves to it?
- Multilingual people's personalities can shift depending on which language they are thinking in; the same person may be bolder in one language and shyer in another. So is there not a single 'me' inside us, but different selves that wake up with the language we speak?