“I prefer the time of insects to the time of the stars,” wrote Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska in her beloved poem “The Possible.” What we love, of course, is not concerned with time – we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of the stars, our temporary lives booked for now and never again. Time confuses us with its elasticity, how it slows down when we are afraid and speeds up when we grow up. It tortures us in its own way, the way waiting twists the mind. It bothers us with its search for meaning. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of the universe, the thing we are made of: “Time is a river that sweeps me away,” Borges growled in the corridor of eternity, “but I am a river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am a tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am a fire.”
But while we don't have control over time itself, we do have a choice about how we understand it, how we live in the moment, how we own the past and be open to the future – a choice that shapes all of our life experiences, that box of time. And just as it reminds us that there are infinite varieties of good lives, it reminds us that there are so many ways to be on time.
In his absolutely amazing book The weather (public library), geologist-turned-psychologist Ruth Allen explores some of them as different ways to sustain our lives.
A generation after Paul Goodman distinguished nine types of peace, Allen distinguishes the types of time in the celebration of what he calls. chronodiversity:
Time is so diverse, and so diversely assembled among contemporary studies, that any long-term attempt to pin down what time it is falls apart. There is a time for insects that live no more than a day, and a time for turtles that live longer than ours. There is time reserved for me, but it is wasted. There is never an equal time in an unequal world, where you can be free and I have to work or vice versa. There is a time we find in chronological order (or chronos) but there are also quality experiences “all in your time” at the moment (or kairos). There is time as seen in elevation, which is different than time at sea level, and there is time that is variable and bent in length. There is a short time of youth when ideas and experiences run clear and fast like spring water, creating an endless and expanding gift, and Christmas that never comes, and a quick time of old age when the lack of new things accelerates life, rushing forward like an arrow to the target without hesitation or deviation. There is the time of our psychological experience, Einstein's relativistic time, and now also the entropic time based on what the physicist Carlo Rovelli calls our “quantum unconsciousness.” “Once we've got all the time elements that can be talked about, we've got the time,” Rovelli said. For now, we don't know the time.
It draws on the work of Marcia Bjornerud – another brilliant geologist – and her thinking the arrival of timeAllen looks at how living in and between these different kinds of time can help us live more fully and connect with meaning (which is, ultimately, the only thing that redeems our mortality). He adds:
Time is not a resource we have to make money. The truth the arrival of time… it is living with awareness of the many changing and unpredictable times that exist within one life, and the interconnected nature of time among all people. To live it well, we may have to break temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relative and interdependent in direct and spatial ways. In this way, time differs between people who combine its meanings and give it movement and life through their interaction.
Dive deep – into the subject and the body of time itself – with the thinking of 200 years in time from some of the greatest human minds, from Kierkegaard to Nina Simone, and enjoy a good old-fashioned children's book. When is the time?.
