The ancient Jains developed a concept called *naya* — the idea that any statement about reality is only true from a particular standpoint, never the whole picture. Their logicians applied this to time too: past, present, and future aren't fixed containers but perspectives that shift depending on where you're standing. What's striking is that grief researcher Pauline Boss arrived at something structurally similar from a completely different direction — her work on 'ambiguous loss' shows that people suffer most not from loss itself but from being locked into a single temporal frame, unable to hold past and present simultaneously. Together, Jain epistemology and Boss's clinical findings suggest something genuinely useful: the distress we feel about time — urgency, regret, the sense that we're behind — often comes from mistaking our current vantage point for the only valid one. Loosening your grip on one frame doesn't mean abandoning it. It means holding it more lightly.

Name one situation in your life where you're treating a past version of events as the definitive account — and ask whether a different temporal standpoint would change what's actually required of you now.

Drawing from Jain Philosophy combined with Contemporary Loss Psychology — Hemacandra ('Yoga Śāstra', c. 1175 CE) and Pauline Boss ('Ambiguous Loss', 1999)