As stubborn and frequently unable to handle certain ideas that friend of mine is, he does ask some good questions.

Today he mentioned that he'd heard that in either Chinese or Japanese, the past was referred to as "forward" and the future as "backwards," while the opposite is true in English. At first I was all, "What are you talking about?" but then I though about it for a second, and I realized, hey, technically he's right, that's true for both languages, although when used in context of time, I'd usually translate them as "before" and "later."

In Chinese, you refer to something that happened a year ago as 一年前 (yi4 nian2 qian2), where the 前 means "before" or "in front." In other words, if you were saying 往前看 (wang3 qian2 kan4) that would be "look forward (in the front direction)" but 一年前 would be "one year before." In the same vein, something that will happen in a year, would be 一年后 (yi4 nian2 hou4) "one year later," and you could also say 往后看 (wang3 hou4 kan4) which would be "look behind." The equivalent Japanese characters are the identical 前 (mae) and 後 (ato).

The thing is, since I'm a native speaker, in my mind the "before" and "in front" ideas are quite simply the same concept, when I'm thinking in Chinese at least. I couldn't see why my friend kept asking for an explanation beyond the (seemingly) obvious relationship between "before" and "in front," or between "later" and "behind."

Then he said, "In English it makes sense to think about the future as forward, because you walk forward into the future, and behind you is the past."

And that was a good point, so I had to think about it a bit, and analyze the concept in my mind. I thought visually (since I think more easily visually) of the events of the future stacked up behind me and the events of the past stacked up in front of me, and wondered why that would make sense.

And then I analyzed my thought process a bit more and realized that I could imagine myself standing on a timeline, looking forward at the stuff that's already happened, and with what is yet to happen crawling forward from behind me, and that's when the distinction hit me.

I said, "Imagine a train. It travels past a fixed point. The first parts of the train, the parts in the front, have already gone past that point, and are in the past. The end of the train, the back of it, has yet to come to that point, and it is in the future.

"In other words, in Western thinking, the human walks forward into the future, but in Eastern thinking, the future comes forward towards the human."

Amazing isn't it? Love languages. Absolutely love languages.