Books on perceiving time
“Time interacts with attention in funny ways” - Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
For many of us, 2020 was the year time moved differently.
Our last vacation felt like watching an accident in slow motion. We ate our way through Los Angeles and Palm Springs while searching in vain for hand sanitizer in every city. We watched public health officers - normally invisible to the general public - give widely broadcast press conferences every morning. We hiked in Joshua Tree and sat in our hotel watching friends from home post videos of empty grocery store shelves on Instagram.
The first few months of shelter-in-place felt like time was expansive. The prospect of commuting or business travel melted away. Social activities were no longer an option. There was no longer anywhere to go, no sports to watch, no malls to wander around in, no restaurants to eat at. Instead, we had time to work through our list of home repairs and cooking projects before the baby came - buying a car that could actually fit a car seat, making beef noodle soup and kimchi, painting the kitchen door. A giant jar of oatmeal served as my main marker for the passage of time.
Other months felt like getting smacked down by wave after wave. The public murder of George Floyd. The peaceful protests yanked by thieves and troublemakers. Wildfires and the orange sky. COVID deaths surging at different times in different places, due to our “patchwork pandemic.” It was another year where it felt like a moral duty to pay attention to breaking news. (Sometimes literally - my inbox filled with pleading emails from immigrant advocacy organizations admonishing me: “don’t look away.”)
Yet after our baby was born, I felt pulled to “enter time completely” with her and let every small moment wash over me. In the early days, every sigh, yawn, lower lip tremble, and fleeting smile was a rush of discovery.
Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing was a wandering companion in those early nights, advocating for focusing on your physical, natural surroundings to dim the noise of digital feeds fighting for (and profiting from) your attention. Commercial social media creates “an arms race of urgency” that demands increasing levels of attention and outrage. News feeds flatten by placing the important next to the mundane and the half-truths, jumbling your sense of where to focus.
It was also helpful to read a few books that put social change on a different time scale. The Overstory is a fiction book that compels you to step into the shoes of crazy tree-huggers and into the souls of centuries-old trees to ask “Who’s really the crazy one? The person who chains themselves to trees to slow their destruction, or the person who stands by as thousand-year-old trees are killed to make way for second homes?” Adam Hochschild’s Lessons from a Dark Time is a book of essays that cover labor movements of the early 1900s, the Congolese Civil War, and Nelson Mandela. He writes in the introduction that “when times are dark, we need moral ancestors” and reminds us that preening, self-important men have met their match in social change movements before. Our Time Is Now, by Stacey Abrams, traced the history of voter suppression over a long time scale, putting today’s challenges into context - calling for action today, but a reminder that victories are won over decades, not days. These stories helped me start the long journey of shedding the one-two punch of panicked urgency and brain-freezing despair.
📚: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
“Time interacts with attention in funny ways.
At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyper focus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day.
At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water.
There used to be a middle way too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.”