We experience time...
We experience time as a loss. A seemingly intrinsic lack. Something we are pressed for. Racing against. Something always running out. The thing that “opens up life and takes everything away”, Carlo Rovelli says.
We experience time as ache and energy. Heat and opposition. The friction of it vanishing. The sense of it rushing by. But nothing hinders the flow.
Everything is made of time.
Time is “made out of people and things that are in it", says Jenny Odell. Something shared and collective. Something given and received. We experience time as generosity and acceptance, grace and humility.
"Mountains are time. Oceans are time”, Dogen says. The time it takes to be made, to be created, to endure. Incalculable events taking place in an instant. We experience time as what Julian Barbour calls, an elaborate “succession of Nows”.
We experience time in rich deposits. All our Nows arranged in rows. A counted structure stacked and shaky. We move from experience to experience with a quota undisclosed. So measurably quantifiable. So unavoidably few. We experience time as something counting down.
And there in lies the secret. Time is an experience. The comprisal of all experiences. A democratization. A flat ontology.
Every experience is of equal import. Each the potential last of its kind.
Idleness is as immediate as productivity. Doing nothing is as important as getting things done. Ambling as vital as efficiency. Meandering as much a priority as moving forward. When nothing is sacred, everything is. We experience time as the reverence of all things.
We experience time through acts of abstention. Through conscientious objection. Holy inactivity. Through observance. Through sabbath. Consecrated leisure and repose. A pledge of self and world. An understanding of how precious it all is. How transient. How short-lived. We can experience time as the satisfaction of a deeper need.
We experience time in rituals of intimacy. Like lovers seamlessly embraced and intertwined. Passion, desire, respite, and ease. An enraptured singularity. Entangled and transfixed. Immanence and transcendence becoming something whole. We can experience time as something sweetly savored. We can experience time as tender touch.
A painting is the arrangement of negative space. Music is silence syncopating sound. Writing is a page punctuated by words. A heart is a muscle at rest between beats. We can experience time as rhythm, as movement, as pause. Discipline, awareness, and skill. We can experience time as the art of being alive. We can experience time as the practice of being still.
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