Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that are not our own become another blur too. Our hours of work and our traveling to work are getting longer and longer, but at the same time our perception of those hours becomes shorter and shorter: short, abstract and ungraspable. We speak of stealing time as if it no longer belonged to us. We speak of needing time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to make time for ourselves as if it were in our power to do so.
From David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea:
Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that are not our own become another blur too. Our hours of work and our traveling to work are getting longer and longer, but at the same time our perception of those hours becomes shorter and shorter: short, abstract and ungraspable. We speak of stealing time as if it no longer belonged to us. We speak of needing time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to make time for ourselves as if it were in our power to do so.
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AuthorTarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm and numerous essays. You may read more of her work at tarnwilson.com. Archives
September 2020
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