Moments in Time
A survey of the ways we perceive and think about time
Donegal coast scene by Rockwell Kent
Welcome to the Micromastery Newsletter. To new readers, browsing through the archive will give a sense of what to expect. We like to think that the newsletter is for exploring learning in general encouraging a polymathic approach to learning through the pattern of micromastery and applying learning to practical wisdom. To all readers, we express our thanks to you for reading our thoughts and suggestions. We are deeply grateful for your interest over the last eighteen months. As many of us approach the run up to celebrating Christmas and we get busy, we are publishing this newsletter early to allow for more opportunity to read it. The follow up newsletter will be posted at the normal time at the end of January.
Moments in Time?
Eternal time
The first time
Clock time or Lived time
Time to time
Time is fleeting
When it’s time
Longtime
The intention here is to look at what we perceive and understand about time from different perspectives. This could give us opportunities to notice points of our own connection to these perspectives.
One useful starting point is to note the difference between clock time (or scientific time) and lived time. Meshing these two different perspectives of time together can be difficult.
To simplify to a workable extent, if we see clock time as ‘timetabled’ time - rigid, sometimes thin slices of time, in which certain things are supposed to happen. It has its positive uses and there can be an abstract beauty to timetables and what they can allow for us. However, often the timetables are based on aggregated data or outdated convention and hence are not always optimal for individuals. An example might be my grandson’s secondary school that starts at 8.15 in the morning, which I would suggest is certainly not optimal for many teenage body clocks. (Timetables are quite often out of synchrony with rhythms found in nature.)
Also, there can be ‘competing’ timetables to navigate. The timetables sometimes impose another kind of time on us while we wait for things to start - transition time, in-between time, loose-end time or nothing time. They don’t generally allow for gradual transitions. The rigidity can become an, at times, inappropriate norm, rather than a general agreement on when something should start or finish. Does one wait for an arbitrary moment or can begin or end when the time is right?
Lifetime
Every time
Meanwhile
Time-tested
At times
Free- time
A good time
No time
Clock time is developed from our perception as time as a thing. By conceptualising time in this way, we can begin to put it outside of our experience and we spatialise it. This conceptualising of time has led us to perceiving it most usually as a line in space made up of a succession of atomistic points. This conceptualisation has its place for short periods of time. This perception leads to all kinds of paradoxes. We also tend to see the past and future as symmetrical on this line.
The perfect time
To late
It’s never too late?
Time flies
Fill your time
Make it last
Hurry
Take your time
********
Lived time is how we as individuals experience time, that is to say, it is subjective, malleable and context dependent. Context includes the environment and activity, and the environment includes one’s inner states.
Our perception of our lived time may be altered by our longing for the future or the past.
‘Looking before and after …
And time becomes more pressing.’
Hamlet
It may be altered by our degree of absorption in the present moment. This can include physical tasks and thought. A deep absorption is commonly described as being in a flow state and slows our perception of time passing. We can lose our sense of our body or self as objects.
Unexpected things slow the flow of our lived time, familiarity can speed it up.
Boredom alters our perception of lived time.
Our living perception of time can be altered by our thoughts about it as a thing, particularly as a resource. For example, we have the phrase ‘Time is money’ – we think it can be saved, wasted and lost or even stolen! Clock time is not entirely fungible like money though, 10 one-minute slices don’t feel the same as 1 ten-minute slice.
A consequence of having to negotiate clock time to allocate our activities, is that for some of us, we feel that we are always rushing, juggling time and that there is not enough time. We are talking about pace or tempo here too as well as allocating activities to ‘available time’. The more we hurry, the more time hurries with us to our future.
Every time
Time after time
All the time
After that time
While there is time
Next time
Wasted time
Killing time
There is a clear connection between our energy level and our perception of time. We do need periods of time where that energy can be generated or conserved. We may describe them in different ways – downtime, play time or free time. (Occasional ‘Free time’ was for most children their favourite lesson when I was a teacher and judged we all needed an extra break. Though some didn’t easily know what to do with it.)
There is a connection between our perceptions of space and movement and our perception of our lived time. The feeling of being cramped both in inner and outer space can make us feel that we don’t have enough time. (Notice the word pressing in the Hamlet quote.)
We have ideas that we can defy time and be outside time.
********
Clearly, there is evidence that we can think differently about time. So, we intend to return to this and suggest some micromastery approaches to thinking and acting differently about time to reduce some of the difficulties in meshing clock time with lived time. It is not so much time management, (though that can be a small aspect of it) but something different. We will have to, perhaps, give it a different name.
I don’t want to waste your time
To bide one’s time
pushed for time
(The quotes here are ones that I have heard, recollect or found. The way we talk about time may to add to the understanding. I add below a couple of examples of ways in which poets have approached the subject and will share more on the micromastery Facebook page and in the next newsletter.)
Clock
We had the sun, stars, shadows.
Today
In Greta’s house, a box
Of numbers and wheels
And cleek – cleek, click clock, that insect
Eating time at the wall.
George Mackay Brown
Empty Room
The clock dissects, on punctuation, syntax.
The clocks voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists: a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.
But time flows through the room, light flows through the
Room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting, or a child snipping at paper.
ASJ Tessimond