On "Saving Time", part 2

Life oscillates in fragile interstices between the past and the future

Jacek Godlewski

May 27, 2023

Reading continued

Hello,

In my previous post:

Jenny Odell Saves (us from the thieves of) Time, part 1

Jacek Godlewski

May 10, 2023

Read full story

I left in the middle of reading and segued into Robert Macfarlane’s Underland to note the convergence between his wonder about living in the middle of deep geological time and Jenny Odell’s restoration of Kairos, the vertical dimension of time we have lost in the chase of more and more exploited, horizontal Chronos.

Both attitudes: stopping the spinning wheel of Chronos to experience Kairos, and realising the responsibility to leave our environment in good shape for our descendants, assume the indispensable objectivity of time. Or rather time-place, because time and land, appropriated by modern economy to become commodities, form, in fact, an intertwined identity: land expressed in time.

Shoreline Park, Santa Barbara, 2019-01-20; source: https://www.coastal.ca.gov/kingtides/gallery.html#sf

The picture above, from California King Tides Project: an illustration of the tidal nature of the present, in a transient gap between the past and the future

Changing the perspective on land and time, from seeing them as resources to respecting as beings is a truly Copernican revolution. In the light of this revised view, a couple of attempts to justify the human impact on nature do not stand up to scrutiny in Jane Odell’s book.

The first is scenario planning, performed by potent oil companies. Prognoses of energy consumption, carbon footprint calculators, sums of money presented as “carbon offsets” fall into a common fallacy: that this way or another, our future is inevitably dependent on these companies.

The second is the term Anthropocene, coined to distinguish the new era in the Earth’s geological history, marked by the profound influence of the human race on the environment. So far, I accepted the notion of Anthropocene as a neutral description of the time we live in, but reading “Saving Time” opened my eyes on the inadequacy of such classification. The prefix anthropo- which addresses all the humanity, attributes the responsibility of catastrophic changes also to those who are the victims of the insatiate greed of others. Furthermore, to wrap the history of our times into a systemising term implies that we are inert subjects of an inevitable course of events. Meanwhile, the whole reasoning that permeates the pages of “Saving Time” admits agency to what we have considered inert, and expels the spectre of inevitability.

The premise of absolute, inflexible and irreversible time has led us to determinism: a notion that our fate is already written into the laws of physics. Pursuit of dominance has ended up in declinism: losing hope about our future and giving in to the threat of extinction. When there is no hope, the only consolation that remains is nostalgia: a wistful reminiscence of “old, good, stable times.” On the contrary, not only recognising, acknowledging, but taking the next step to resonate with, to respond to the innate time of others, including elements of nature, gives us a perspective of growing time and hope.1

Time flows at a various pace and in a distinct way for different people. There is a time of expectation and time of intense action in an emergency. Time which incarcerated people live through2, and indispensable time to accomplish everyday chores, unfairly longer for people with disabilities.3 We have all experienced an unprecedented shift of time during the pandemic. It expanded for people, who could stop commuting and benefited from working remotely, and shrunk drastically for care workers suddenly thrust into workload above physical capability and beyond mental resilience. There is no one universal time for everybody.

Varying rhythms of time carry different meanings. Day time of activity and night time of sleep, seasonal changes from the anticipation in spring to summer activity to the deserved refuge of cosy warmth at home in winter; and from even higher aerial view, time of exploration in youth, responsibility in mature years, and decline of strength counterbalanced with accumulated wisdom when growing old; all these incessant changes make time similar rather to a living plant than to an abstract vector.

Here comes one of the most compelling thought I absorbed from “Saving Time”:

Would it be possible not to save and spend time, but to garden it - by saving, inventing, and stewarding different rhythms of life? […] If time can be gardened, then it is also possible to imagine its increase in ways other than individual hoarding4

A constructive proposal how to grow time involves human relations:

Time is not money. Time is beans. […] Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game and that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best time for you to get some would be to give it back to me. If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world!5

I must admit that the courage to sacrifice my time to give it to others and the audacity of hope that finally it will grow fruits in everybody involved, including me, is a compelling art to learn. Is it not why we read books? To have our eyes open, horizons broadened, habits questioned and challenges posed?

Time taken down from the plinth of absolute values to the ground of plants growing at the pace of individual rhythms leads to one more liberating discovery: it is OK to reconcile with my limitations. None of us will grow forever, and nobody will achieve everything:

No matter how optimised, healthy, and productive I am, I simply will not become more or better forever, which means there are things I will never do and never be.6

Having accepted this, we do not need to chase around the dial of a clock anymore. We can, and we should, tune ourselves to resonate with opportune instances of “meantime”, which is a time-place where we stop and halve time into the past and the present. In this interstice, we pay attention, we doubt, ask questions and listen to the patterns in nature, to our feelings, and emerging ideas.7

On the last pages of the book, Jane Odell leaves the reader on a rocky shore swallowed by a rising tide, maybe similar to the photograph at the top of this post, in a state of mind vacillating in between despair and joy. The overwhelming awareness of tremendous, perennial, untamed forces of the elements coexists with the reassuring certainty of repeating patterns. There will be an ebb after the tide, the birds will come back to the rocks once they emerge. Human heartbeat resonates with the pulsating, tidal nature of the world seen through the lens of Kairos.

A book ends, the next day begins

You may say that it is a luxury of the privileged to afford the time to stop and open to elusive experiences. To fulfil daily duties and pay the bills, many have little choice other than racing against the clock. Still, I dare to say that we can. The key is to admit my limitations. I will not grow forever, and will not achieve everything. I see it bitterly in the decline of my physical strength and fitness. Many people older than me are in much better physical shape, but in my time I am aging this way. My bike rides will be shorter, and mountain hikes less demanding. I cannot ride further and hike higher forever. In some mysterious way, these smaller achievements are not at all less rewarding.

Everyone deserves to live in concord with their time, not with the time someone imposed on them. I can see it clearly in everyday work. All these techniques, pep talks and guides how to become more “productive” (I hate the word) are frenzy attempts, usually counterproductive, to squeeze more profit from workers. Don’t waste my time in irrelevant talks, consult when necessary, and provide undisturbed time to think and work at my own pace. This attitude proves to be more efficient than reminding about the spinning clock too often.

I feel strongly that everybody should consider and choose their unique way, a single path of action, or inaction, that will contribute to leaving a better legacy (see this anchor in the previous post.) The capacity of time-places on Earth is limited; could my travelling less save them for future generations? The Nature is resilient, but only when given time to recover. Maybe a change of my eating habits could buy a bit of the precious time for the ecosystems to recuperate?

Every considerate action, or thoughtful retreat from unnecessary activity, may add to the power of saving time. Saving time for us, to think deeper and look further, and preserving it for our descendants so that they can benefit from the gift of their time, too.

Further relevant reading

While writing the previous post, I encountered an interesting video on the BBC, about Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar Point in Scotland, a non-continuous arrangement of rock strata which inspired John Hutton, the father of modern geology (1726-1797), to put forward a new estimation of the age of the Earth:

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0f7smlm/the-man-who-discovered-the-abyss-of-time-