During convalescence it grows hard to tell the difference between when to pass the time and when to allow time to pass through
I wonder if this article, Strange Days, would resonate with you too, especially if you have experimented with detaching yourself from the instrumentalised rhythms and habitual movements of our task-oriented, profit-driven everyday life, to attend silent meditation retreats and/or cultivate (successfully or not) a regular contemplative practice. In either case, I think they are the folds – of better, cuttings – of spacetimemattering that can be reasonably described as enactive durations of convalescence.
I really like this paragraph. It got me curious: what about the spacetimemattering functions of Facebook/social media?
The days—mornings and then long afternoons…People ask “How do you pass the time?” and though I usually answer glibly in the moment, I find myself getting stuck on the question when I’m alone. The words make less and less sense as I consider. The idea that there is this great intangible entity that we are all of us—the convalescing ones maybe particularly—passing through or in some way channeling through ourselves, and that this entity is somehow singular, as in the time. I know it’s a casual figure of speech, not a reasoned proposition, but all the more reason to ponder it. For it is in terms of the assumed and collectively accepted logic of such phrases that we live and take our basic bearings. “How do you pass the time?” suggests the basic model of existence, in which living a life is seen on the one hand as traversing an unspecified span of time—marked out in years—and on the other, as moving through the natural cycle of hours, from dawn to dusk. Time, then, is understood to be a medium one negotiates. And in this respect: how do I pass the time? Well, I suppose that I pass it in various ways—reading, writing notes, napping, taking walks, eating…And as it happens, each of these things gives me a different feeling about time. There is the sense of distended pause that I have when I am sitting in place, thinking or writing; and there is the more marked-off, syncopated rhythm of mailboxes and driveways and birds fluttering up into the trees when I go walking. And the almost otherworldly silence that comes over me in these rooms, when I just sit at the table and let the gaze pan from the corner all the way across—taking in the framed photos of the kids on top of the shelf, the bowl of stones gathered on the Truro beaches, the clay pitcher borrowed straight from a Morandi canvas, and then the big mirror on the far wall, which holds these same objects captive in its smooth silver depth. Mirrors create silence, I think. I make a note. Other afternoons I have that feeling that is like floating slowly through the air sometimes when I close my eyes and just listen to the sounds around me. These—and so many others—are the ways I pass the time, or ways that the time passes through me. They are also the different ways I am, and now I have to wonder what time even has to do with it.
spacetimemattering 