Inhabiting Time
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river..." Jorge Luis Borges
I have found myself asking: Am I truly inhabiting time well? Or am I simply moving through my day, moving from one task to the next without thought or care of a sense of presence? It’s a question I have reflected on with the realization that I am temporal and only have a limited amount of time in my life. Inhabiting time, inhabiting my life more deeply is something I am pausing to consider how I use my time.
Like many, I enjoy distraction. The worst offender is my smart phone. It offers ups plethora of diversions: from social media to games to videos. This is what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “non-time” which are filled with meaningless activities that only reinforce more mindless consumption. We get trapped in the algorithm. It also creates within us a sense that we don’t have enough time. That we are simply moving from one event to another, one task to another, one distraction to another. Why? Because there is never a feeling of completion.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger redefined time not as the clicking-seconds of a clock but as temporality, finitude and existence itself. He focuses a lot on the German term da-sein which literally translates to “being there.” It means to be present and to be available. Before Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard viewed time as something that exists between the fleeting present and eternal. He saw each moment not as a tiny fraction of normal time but as the point where the infinite touches time. Each moment contains the atom of eternity. Both of these philosophies stress not drowning in abstraction, in wasting one’s time in endless entertainments and the crowd mentality. Instead, dwelling more deeply in the present.
As I was standing at my kitchen window, watching the much-needed rain fall and a Brown Thrasher flying about from feeder to feeder in it, I looked at the spot where the once grand old oak stood in my backyard. I keep a piece of this oak on my desk. After a really bad storm, it became obvious that this oak was damaged to the point of needing to be cut down. It was a difficult decision and it was heartbreaking to watch as the crew chopped it from top to bottom, bit by bit.
This oak has lived in a cycle of time that extends far beyond any I will inhabit. For the years I have lived in my house, I would often go outside just to touch its bark and communion with it. To feel the texture of its time here. The oak’s existence provided more meaning in my own life because its resilience and strength were a constant reminder that one can both survive and thrive and weather our days while still providing beauty. Doing so moved me from Chronos (or clock time) to Kairos (proper, appointed or supreme time - a spiritual time). The oak lived in a slow natural pace, the pace of nature, that moves beyond the momentary.
