The Lakota concept of 'Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ' — 'all my relations' — encodes a profound insight about time: that the present moment is not a isolated point but a living intersection of ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants. This relational view of time, studied by Indigenous studies scholar Vine Deloria Jr. in 'God Is Red' (1973), challenges the Western tendency to treat time as a personal resource to be managed or spent. On a Monday, when we're tempted to view the week as a blank ledger of hours to fill, it's worth asking whether our plans honor what came before and what we're handing forward. Time, in this view, is not yours to optimize — it's a shared inheritance you're briefly holding.

If the hours you're planning this week were a loan from both the past and the future, what would you spend differently — and what would you stop spending entirely?

Drawing from Indigenous Philosophy (Lakota / Plains Nations) — Vine Deloria Jr. ('God Is Red', 1973)