Episode #13 of Just a Girl Under a 🌲 Tree, Reading a 📖 and Asking it to Love💗 Her
There’s something tender about returning to your own words after many years — especially words that were once written in the thick of study and curiosity.
In today’s episode, I’m reading from my own graduate writing — a paper I wrote fifteen years ago titled Time as a System.
Usually, I sit beneath the branches and read the words of others, but this time felt different. I wanted to revisit something I wrote long ago while working on my Master’s in Conflict Analysis and Management — though I’ve never quite adhered to the idea of managing anyone’s conflict. I’ve always preferred to think of it as building capacity for people to navigate their own. (But alas, that was the program’s name… and I digress.)
This piece explored how our mental perception of time influences the way we communicate, listen, and resolve conflict. At the time, there wasn’t much written about the relationship between time perception and mediation, and this paper became my way of imagining what dialogue might look like if we considered how differently each of us experiences time.
Reading it again now, beneath the same kind of quiet canopy that first inspired the idea, felt like meeting my younger self halfway — across fifteen years of conversations, growth, and pauses in between.
If you’ve ever revisited something you wrote long ago and heard it with new ears, you might recognize the stillness that comes with that moment — the way time folds gently back on itself.
