‘Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.’

D I V E   I N

​

Time

 

​

 

​

1.

​

There are lots of questions about time. First and foremost, what is it? Then, once your mind is sufficiently boggled: is it a man-made construct? Is there more than one way to measure it? There are endless scientific and philosophical debates about these massive questions and very few definitive answers.

​

Something we do know, though, is that most of us are slaves to the clock. Our lives are shaped by our understanding of time which is based on a schedule — going to work, eating dinner, picking children up. We rarely simply do things when we want to or when they feel right. Instead, we do them according to the dials on a clock (or, increasingly, the digital display on a phone), rather than nature and thus, our gut instincts. We can’t define this way of living as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it’s more complex than that. Regardless, many of us feel we have to adhere to the clock if we are to survive in this modern world, yet we feel discontented with the specific times we must do certain things and the quantity of time we spend doing them. Can we live by a clock without being a slave to it? Or, at the very least, can we have boundaries when it comes to our time?

​

The answer is: yes. In France, employees have the legal right to ignore work communications outside of working hours. In Sweden, maternity and paternity leave is generous, allowing parents to spend time with their children. In our former home, a small island in Hong Kong, the little, independent shops opened when they wanted to (one shop remained closed for months, simply because the owner was doing other things). In many Mediterranean countries, there’s a deep cultural understanding of balance. They carve an unspecified period of time into their days in which they stop working or shopping and have a rest, a nap, or lunch. Here in the U.K. and likely elsewhere, too, we refer to this as a ‘long’ lunch because, by our own cultural standards, it exceeds the prescribed length of a lunchbreak. Cue clock versus culture. As Smithsonian Magazine says, ‘While it’s possible to syncronise clocks, syncronising cultures has proven more challenging.’ What a muddle; most people adhering to ‘global time’  (thanks to trade) yet perceiving the value of time in entirely different ways.

​

2.

​

We are intimately familiar with one of the Greek concepts of time. Chronos — the root of chronological — is linear, measurable, and quantative. Chronos is personified as an old, cruel man, stifled by the constraints of time. As Dan Kieran says in The Idle Traveller, ‘we all wear our watches in honour of him.’

​

But the Greeks had another concept of time that offers us more than just a clock. Kairos is the god of ‘the right time’. The winged deity represents qualitative and divine time, and is interested in moments rather than minutes. He darts by fleetingly and must be grabbed when seen so the opportunity he’s providing at this right, critical time isn’t missed. Tellingly, kairos is the modern Greek word for ‘weather’, and the plural (kairoi) means ‘the times’. The root of the word kairos is believed to relate to archery, specifically the optimum moment when an arrow can be fired to achieve the best results.

​

3.

​

Time is inherent in nature and thus our bodies. Indigenous peoples have always known this, relying on nature’s rhythms to ascertain the time of day, month, or year. They look to sunrise, sunset, and noon to shape their days, and to the sun and moon’s movements (e.g. the sun sitting over the ridge of a specific mountain) to establish the seasons and the equinoxes. Many tribes need to know the rough time because certain rituals and ceremonies can only happen at certain points during the year in accordance with nature’s cycle. Some also use the seasons to keep track of age, e.g., if you were born when the trees did something specific, it’s obvious which month that was. To reference a specific time, some tribes point to a place in the sky where the sun will be positioned. They observe the movements and characteristics of the sun and moon, and use them to navigate their daily lives.

 

Even with the sundial, one of our earliest physical clocks, time was firmly rooted in, and dictated by, the natural world.

​

4.

​

We often inhibit ourselves through the way we talk about time. It’s rare to have a conversation about doing something (meditating, holidaying, reading, etc.) without the phrase ‘I don’t have time’ being spoken. Modern productivity culture is so ingrained that we refer to any time not filled with plans as ‘free time’, which tacitly implies that we pay in some way for the time that’s filled. We also call it ‘spare time’, which suggests that unfilled time is some kind of different, additional time, not central to our lives, perhaps even unnecessary or useless (as per the phrase ‘a spare part’). Psychology of language aside, it can be boiled down to priorities. As the School of Life says, ‘We say time is precious, but our actions reveal our real priorities: we devote a huge portion of our existence to making money… We have a highly concrete and detailed sense of accounting around finances, while time invisibly slips away.’

​

Since the start of the pandemic, this has started to shift. Our work, social, and home lives have changed dramatically, forcing most of us to re-assess how we want to live. Maybe we’ve also been reminded that giving someone or something our time is an act of generosity, especially if you think about your life in its entirety. If giving the gift of your time to a work spreadsheet or a childhood friend brings you joy, that’s wonderful. If it doesn’t, a re-evaluation of values could help. Right now is the ideal moment — kairos — to evaluate who or what gets the gift of our time.
 

5.

​

What if we’re unable to practically change our current situation to better suit our values and schedules? There is another way.

​

In Travels with Epicurus, philosopher Daniel A. Klein recounts a conversation with a friend in Greece. They are discussing kombolói, a string of beads within Greek and Cypriot culture that look similar to prayer or worry beads. When Klein refers to them as the latter, his friend admonishes this translation, saying that they are nothing to do with worry. ‘Kombolói have to do with time, with spacing it out, making it last,’ he says. They go on to explore the idea that time is malleable and can be what you want it to be.

 

Being at an appointment at a certain time or at the office for a set amount of time is what it is; we can’t change the clock. But we can change our perception of time. If we shift our perspective, we could still be at work at 9am but possess a deep understanding that time itself (before, during, after) feels however we want it to feel. There’s something liberating about realising we can experience time however we want, even if our days contain structure or schedule. We can choose to see time as limited, set in stone, or increments on a clock. Or we can choose to see it as generous, flexible, and open. It’s possible that we could live by time, not according to a clock or society but according to ourselves.