An exercise in presencing
Small rebellions that feel powerful in their stillness
Over the course of this year my thinking has frequently been dancing with time.
In starting out as a freelancer I’ve been reassessing my relationship with time, money and value. As a first-time gardener I’ve been bewitched by natural time, avidly watching life grow and change through the seasons. Through Learning to Reconnect I’ve been experimenting with exercises that broaden perspectives across time, to past ancestors and future generations. This fascination has been gently nurtured by a number of thinkers, but many of the roots come from Emergence Magazine’s focus on Time for their fifth print edition this year.
As is natural, this focus has ebbed and flowed over the months. At moments I have held the ethereal big picture, connecting to a timelessness of thought that has revelled in the abstract of time’s (made-up) essence. But for some days, some months, I’ve been in the weeds. Entangled and caught in the detail and reality of everyday life. Roughly pushed and pulled through linear time in a learned need to be productive. It only takes a small moment to disrupt this hungry spiral of striving. A short meditation that says stop. Physically taking a pause on the busy streets of London. Small rebellions that feel powerful in their stillness. That is to say, despite knowing that Chronos time[1] is addictive, I am still often caught. But I am building the muscle to notice and be aware of these hooks, to better catch myself and take action to be more choiceful with time.
Even this post has been an exercise of patience and evolving deadlines. There are a multitude of voice notes and journal entries that I’ve been excited to weave together, but amidst the year-end volume of work, it’s not something that has yet been crafted. So, I’m instead seeing this as an opportunity to again lean into the discomfort of emergence and not knowing. Perhaps I will be able to share a more woven piece on time in future months, but for today I will share my reflections from a day in July. A day that was purposefully ‘out-of-time’ and captures an essence of what I’d love to bring into the everyday…
[14th July 2024]
Today I practised an exercise from Emergence’ Magazine’s ‘A Practise in Time’ workbook, the companion booklet to the magazine’s fifth edition on Time.
The task was to spend a day without referencing a clock. Instead, I was to pay more attention to my surroundings, to see what generated a sense of time passing. How does the rhythm of a day feel when unmoored from the clock?
From a practical point of view, it is worth mentioning is how difficult it is to avoid clock time entirely! Just walking through the kitchen, one of the main thoroughfares in the house, I pass two illuminated digital clocks and a wall mounted analogue clock. When answering a call or wanting to use an app to help identify birdsong, I was greeted with measured time. Even driving to the lake for my morning swim, I was overly conscious of not looking at the dashboard, but this just highlighted how much of a habit it is to (want to) check the time. The day became a practise of mindfulness. to engage the break on my hand reaching out for the phone, or to divert a stroll through the house, to stay as true as possible to the practise.
Logistics aside, what emerged from today was beautiful.
By not clock watching, a free day became spacious. Instead of wondering what to do next and panicking about not being able to fit in all the options, I was led by feeling. It was a day of embodied choices and the marvel of rest, joy, calm, ease, and all that follows from operating in the luxury of an intentionally slower pace.
The first shift was my morning swim. Usually, I would be thinking about how long I had allocated for a swim, to make sure I’d get home with time to give other activities. With this self-imposed constraint removed, I could be fully present in a way I had neglected in recent weeks. Without a time to ‘fit into’, my pace also slowed. I had intended to ‘properly’ exercise and push for distance, bit instead I felt the benefits of responding to my body – shoulder aching, body too cold – to go less far, but truly taking in the surroundings. The flow of cool water on my skin. The ripples leading out in front and around me. The lapping water as I flowed forwards. The dappled light beneath the surface of the lake; the sun shining through and refracting to different prisms of colour. The monochrome landscape when looking towards the sun. The technicolour to either side of me; bright blue sky, vibrant green trees, bold red brick of the Thames Hospice building.
Back at home I spent time in the garden, my senses tuned into the world around me. Sunlight filtering through trees, birds flitting through the branches singing, their calls layering one another to create a musical ebb and flow. I was captivated by the different songs and felt a chasm in my knowledge, in not being able to name the artists. Despite living in this area for a few years and knowing we have vibrant morning birdsong, I had taken this for granted. The birds nonetheless sang whilst I tended the garden, deadheading and watering the plants.
New dahlias were starting to bloom, a different variety to the ones that came out earlier in the season, and I was astonished by the intricacy of their unfolding. Starting as tight green spheres, edges slowly open origami triangles of red and orange, a scaled dragon-eye left at the centre, before finally opening to a concertinaed circle of petals. (Surely these must be the inspiration behind paper pom poms?) So incredibly neat and ordered. The second law of thermodynamics may say that time flows towards disorder, but I feel these dahlias are mocking any attempt to neatly box up any ‘law’ of time. They bloom into symmetry not just once, but over and over, with each new bud through the year, then repeated again the following year, and the next… So captivated by this origami-esque flower, I’m inspired to take daily pictures of the opening buds, to visualise this miraculous unfolding over time.
Being ‘out-of-time’ on a Sunday, brought its own quirks. Whilst in the middle of a meditation I jumped at the sound of church bells ringing to announce the morning service. I had to chuckle, as for the next ten minutes I listened to the bells gradually slow in rhythm, pausing even, before continuing anew at a more vigorous pace. It sounded like the enactment of an unwanted nap being kept at bay. The slow drooping of eyelids before jerking back to wake. It was nonetheless a timely reminder that no matter my intentions, the church bells would be an unavoidable marker of time through the day. But there was still something grounding in this. It’s what the bells are for! Back when individuals had no personal time piece, the bells would’ve conducted village activity, and in some way this connected me through time to the people who once lived here.
From then on my activities were driven by embodied decisions; when I felt ‘done’ with gardening, when it was time for lunch, what I did with my afternoon. Having no boundaries or knowledge of how long I had been or had ‘left’, made it a day spent in the present. Being able to zoom in my attention where it was called to be. I whiled away an afternoon drawing various flowers in the garden, tracking down a high-pitched buzzing insect, helping Marcus with dinner, playing a game, reading outside in the evening sun.
I felt at home at this pace. Happy and at ease, at no time did I feel dysregulated or anxious about what was happening next or having to make a decision. My body indicated when it was done and that it was time to move on, no rational overthinking involved.
This was a step back to real-time. A time and pace we were born for.
[1] Chronos time is quantitative, it “refers to clock time - time that can be measured - seconds, minutes, hours, years.” In contrast “kairos [time] is qualitative. It measures moments, not seconds. Further, it refers to the right moment, the opportune moment. The perfect moment. The world takes a breath, and in the pause, before it exhales, fates can be changed.”