THE THREAD | A sideways look at time and the art of living
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This image is a time-lapse photo of the constellation Orion and the Orion nebula. The horizontal lines are light streaks made by satellites orbiting the earth. It is a visual representation of how I’ve been trying to think about time lately: In this image, the presence and speed of our civilization’s technology literally clutters our view and prevents us from fully grasping the slow, deep movements in time and space beyond our daily modern lives.
I’ve been in a long, slow conversation with myself over two books I read a while ago: Robert Grudin’s Time and The Art of Living and Jay Griffith’s A Sideways Look at Time. They offer two perspectives on how humans view and experience time. Following the upheavals of the past year, they both offer some useful ways of revisiting how I think about hours, days, years.
I don’t know about you, but when everything shut down I quickly became disoriented in my own sense of the passing of time. Without the ability to go anywhere, time was no longer marked by movement and destination, departure and arrival. Everything paused, yet I still had work to do, a family and a house to care for. The usual rhythms, routines, and rituals were suddenly thrown into disorder, replaced by this sudden openness. I would normally welcome an opening of time. Yet this one was brought on by a public health crisis with no end in sight, and I didn’t know what to do with the openness. My son said it well last summer: “I don’t know what I want to do because I don’t know what’s possible.”
There’s also the treadmill effect: We all had adapted to a faster pace, and when everything suddenly stopped, our minds, bodies, and beings wanted to keep moving at that faster pace. I had no idea I had been running so fast.
In A Sideways Look at Time, Griffiths argues that the way modern humans experience time is a construct of Western Capitalist society, one that is driven by control by those in power. We mark time by the millisecond in order to quantify and monetize as much of it as possible. She mentions the year 1913, which is when the universal clock first ticked in Paris, France. With that first tick, time became one more force of imperialism marching across the globe. “With its dominant ideology, the West declares its time the time.” Indigenous cultures have always moved through time in relationship to seasons, nature, rituals, story, and memory—ways of being in the world that have been and continue to be supplanted and suppressed by the ticking of the colonizer’s clock. To Griffiths, time is a form of human freedom, “and when it is seized by someone else’s power it is colonization of the mind.”
Her argument against the colonization of the mind is more relevant than ever. The rush to return to work over the past year was not driven by public health, equity, or the common good, but by the economic forces and profit motives of the very wealthy. Jeff Bezos and his friends are absurdly wealthier, while the average American has lost work, income, and security at astonishing levels. In the midst of a global crisis, the wealthy still managed to rob the time and well-being of the working poor, and to disrupt and micro-manage the rest of us back to business as usual. The rich did not cause the pandemic, but they leaned on the economic levers to determine who would recover and reap the rewards of a crisis.
Pivoting now to Time and The Art of Living, this book is a meditation on how an individual might conceive of time in a way that best serves creative endeavors. “Time takes on significance,” Grudin writes, “when we frame it on a human scale.” So whereas Griffith draws attention to the many ways modern human’s construct of time is a tool of oppression, Grudin wants to argue that it is precisely the modern human’s ability to choose how to conceive of and move through time that sets humanity apart from other creatures. Our ability to put time in our service is not an act of control but of creation. He writes, “Only by asserting yourself in time can you achieve functional identity, and become in fact what you seem to be in the mirror.”
Griffiths suggests that any act of seizing time is an act against freedom. But Grudin would say that at the small scale of the individual, seizing one’s own use of one’s given hours is the only approach to freedom. In this sense, containing time becomes more of a vessel, not a prison cell.
Griffith encourages the deliberate choice for wild time. She explores how we experience time in its fullest when we are in the midst of time’s suspension—listening to music, having sex, or after a few glasses of wine. Time deepens, becomes richer and non-linear. Wild time, she says, can restore our sense of the fullness of time and counteract the forces that seek to squeeze productivity out of every hour. She also points to play, as evidenced by childhood, as the pinnacle of wild time. As I begin a summer at home with my three young children, I know I need the constant reminder to say Yes when they ask me to play with them. May I be forgiven for the moments I think of child play to be an obligation rather than the very thing that sets me free from obligation. (And following a year of far too much togetherness with my children, I also realize that it’s essential to find forms of play that are for me and me alone.)
So there is a deep wildness within time—a universe beyond the satellites—which can help free us of the many ways society seeks to control and manipulate. I can name the ways my given hours have been hijacked by external forces—perhaps not by a boss barking orders on a factory floor, but certainly by unseen algorithms that seek to know my mind better than I know it myself. And yet seeking to be free of external controls is not the same as the freedom to choose and create. The removal of shackles allows for movement, but moving itself is a different choice—as is how to move, to where, alongside whom, and at who’s pace.
After so much time spent in front of a screen, I am forced to consider the ways it has impacted my sense of location and time. When you can be a virtual participant anywhere and at any time, it can almost feel like someone has lifted a part of you right out of your seat, and there you are, actually in that small square on the screen. Is that me?
We experience time on screens as fragmentation, news bits, images, opinions detached from context, all arranged by algorithms whose only mission is to keep us looking at the screen—to steal our time, to colonize our minds, to clutter up our field of vision. We half-heartedly call this connection.
And so, I believe it turns out that wild time and vessel time are able to serve well together. They are both concerned with the fullness of time. Griffiths moves toward finding the deeper well within wild time; Grudin moves toward seizing that wild energy and directing it. Wild time seeks to free us from the constructs and constraints that have infiltrated our lives. Wild time gets us back into our bodies to explore and enjoy and play. And from that deep freedom of wild time we can then turn back toward our own minds, renewed and restored, with the ability to choose how we imagine our own sense of time, to envision something better, and to go about creating vessels of time that can be gifts to ourselves, to others, and to a world hungry for freedom.
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What I'm up to: I'll be teaching a creative writing class at Jacob's Well Church in KC every Monday in June. If you or someone you know might be interested, you can sign up HERE.
What I'm reading: Jay Griffith's A Sideways Look at Time, Robert Grudin's Time and The Art of Living
What I'm listening to: Yola's Walk Through Fire, a ton of Patty Griffin
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Peace and grace,
Andrew