This Time in this Place

What is it asking of you?

Along the Icefields Parkway in Alberta

“Our time may be short, but we do have great powers to compress and elongate the minutes we have.” ~ Neil King Jr, American Ramble

I remember driving along the Icefields Parkway in Alberta, between Banff and Jasper, like it was yesterday. It was only part of a day but we stopped many times to just soak in the view, like this one above. Time seemed to stop. That can happen when you’re on vacation with no agenda in mind. Moments of wonder and awe come more easily.

I’ve been pondering time lately, a theme that came up while following the threads of my attention. Time isn’t uniform; it’s elastic, and experienced differently by everyone all the time, depending on what we’re doing. Sometimes, it feels as if time’s speeding by, as fast as a locomotive, my father-in-law said once. Sometimes it feels as slow as molasses, like it will never end. And then, there are those times when we forget about time completely.

As I get older, I’ve become more deliberate about how I want to spend my time and, even more importantly, how I want to experience it. I believe that this is closely related to seeing clearly. I often advocate for slowing down, even pausing, and noticing how the body reacts to experiences. By doing these things, we change our relationship to time. We see more.

I’ve been reading a lot about time, and in this post, you’ll find some of the takeaways from the very excellent resources that have come my way (see list at the end), about different kinds of time, as well as links to experiments that you can try to experience time differently.

The Notion of Time

Jenny Odell’s book, Saving Time, is not about time management, but rather about literally saving time from its predominant meaning - that time is linear, time is money, time is scarce, and that we need to be productive every minute. This is “clock time,” or ‘chronos’ in Greek, and it was created to make life more efficient. However, I think most of us would agree that we sometimes feel ruled by the clock, and all of the things on our to do lists.

Odell delves into the history of how this meaning came to be the standard. She argues that it’s usually not clock time that gives us experiences of meaning and purpose. In fact, in keeping with Rovelli, it’s our relationships and interactions that give life meaning. Our best experiences often happen when we forget about time completely, as I did while driving the Icefields Parkway. They’re often times where you become aware of beauty and experience wonder or awe. You feel joy and gratitude. We remember these times much more clearly than we do when we’re on the clock.

The Greek word for when time seems to stop is called ‘kairos.’ These moments feel timeless. Kairos time also has the connotation of being the “right time,” or a moment ripe for opportunity or a chance to do something. For example, you witness a beautiful music performance and it suddenly becomes clear that you want to play music for the rest of your life.

These can also be moments of crisis or tragedy, of fear or sadness; times of uncertainty and unpredictability. Can you imagine how the people of Los Angeles are experiencing time right now as they witness the unpredictability of wildfire? The time of the pandemic was sometimes referred to as kairos time. Everything was uncertain and we couldn’t respond in the usual ways.

The Science of Time

In his book, The Order of Time, scientist Carlo Rovelli says that our perception of time is like an arrow, moving steadily from past to present to future. This is the linear sense of time, or “clock time,” that we live in most of the time. Yet, this perception is only in our minds; it’s not reality. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are just human-created measurements of change.

Rovelli argues that we don’t need a time variable to describe the world. We only need to know how things relate to each other. We are situated in a particular time and place, surrounded by a network of interrelated events or points of view that he calls ‘happenings.’ Within this network, we each have our own particular memories. This is essential to understanding how we experience time.

Rovelli shares an interesting story of how this relational aspect works, as described by Saint Augustine. When we listen to a song, the meaning of a sound only comes from the sounds before and after. The music won’t make any sense if we’re only hearing the note being played right now. We have to remember the sounds that came before and hear them in relation to the sounds we’re currently hearing. This, in essence, is what time is, in our minds, as memories and anticipation.

Resonance

Last year, I wrote a post about resonance, after reading a book of the same name by Harmut Rosa. Resonance occurs when something inside of you responds to something outside of you. He argues that these types of experiences are an antidote to the rapidly accelerating pace of the world; perhaps an antidote to clock time.

Rosa says that resonant experiences can’t be manufactured, but they can be blocked when there is a felt scarcity of time. It requires a shift from trying to control the world to opening up to it. We can practice creating “paths of potential for resonance to occur in all areas - home, job, partner, aesthetic practices, and the communities of which we are a part.”

Circular Time

Chloe Salmon is a young writer on climate, and two recent posts address the subject of time. In Part 1, she shares how there are other societies that subscribe to a different model of time, one that is circular or cyclical, not linear. We know this kind of time too, when we experience time, not by the clock, but by the changing of the seasons, the daily rising and setting of the sun and moon, or even times of new life or the death of someone we love. Australian Aboriginal communities speak of this type of time as ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘the dreaming.’

“Time is something to be learned from living. You would tell time not by glancing at your watch, but rather by observing the behavior of species with whom you share your home: their seasonal feeding and breeding habits, patterns of migration, the arrival of certain blossoms, and so on. One’s sense of time is derived from deep knowledge of the environment, achieved through minute observation and passed down generations.”

This model of time affects how people behave, move and act, use resources, enact rituals, etc. There is a time for everything. In other words, they’re paying attention to what’s happening now and responding accordingly. They’re seeing clearly what’s needed.

In Part 2, Chloe introduces the term, ‘spectacle deficiency,’ which is when something is slowly changing or unraveling, yet it’s barely discernible to our human eyes. Modern day examples include the extinction of wildlife, the thawing of permafrost, and the long-term effects of chemical pollution. There is no spectacular event. Instead, it’s slowly happening over time. She calls this ‘slow violence.’ You have to be paying very close attention to see and understand what is happening.

Can you think of an example of ‘slow violence’ where you live? What has changed slowly over time and how is this affecting your life and place?

Experiments in Time

I’ve written a lot over the last few years on how to experience time differently? Here are a few links to some of those posts with ideas for you to try.

• Notice how your day is made up of a series of events, happenings, interactions. Read: Relationships are Everything.

• Create the conditions for resonance.

• As far as circular time goes, what seasonal clues are present right now? How do they invite action?

• There is a time to act.

• Take time for skywatching.

• Practice going slow.

I hope that these thoughts make you think about how you experience time. Please let me know how you resist linear, clock time and open yourself to experiencing time differently.

Resources

Jenny Odell, Saving Time (book), Another Kind of Time (article)

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (book), On Being podcast episode, All Reality is Interaction

Chloe Salmon, Our New Climate - Part 1 and Part 2

Book: Resonance by Harmut Rosa