Waking Up
Time as Pressure
The alarm goes off. I’m not ready to wake up. The pressures of the day are already pressing in before I’ve fully shaken off the threads of sleep or properly opened my eyes to the new day.
I grab an extra five minutes. It feels stolen. It also feels risky. What if I drift off again and five minutes becomes forty-five?
My diary tells me the day is already broken into sections — often unrelated — jarring awkwardly against one another. Meetings. Tasks. Appointments. Obligations. And my diary stretches far beyond today, extending both into the future and back into the past. Measured out. Rigid. Uncompromising. Unforgiving.
And much of it self-imposed.
We all know this version of time – it is the sea we swim in, the air we breathe; we live within it as if it were the natural order of things.
Most of us never question it. We simply count the days until our next ‘break’ – a holiday from time which becomes just another extension of it, because there is so much life we feel we must cram into such a narrow window. It passes before we even begin to relax into it and the countdown to the next ‘break’ begins. “Thank God it’s Friday” becomes a mantra for the headlong dash toward a hollow future that promises release yet endlessly delivers more of the same.
This is ‘fleeting’ time. The thin sliver of ‘no-time’ squeezed between the momentum of a relentless past and the emotional expectations of a programmed future. It is gone before we can savour it because past and future meet so seamlessly that there is scarcely a Planck’s width of existence between them.
The alarm goes off. I’m not ready to wake up. The pressures of the day are already pressing in before I’ve fully shaken off the threads of sleep or properly opened my eyes to the new day.
I grab an extra five minutes. It feels stolen. It also feels risky. What if I drift off again and five minutes becomes forty-five?
My diary tells me the day is already broken into sections — often unrelated — jarring awkwardly against one another. Meetings. Tasks. Appointments. Obligations. And my diary stretches far beyond today, extending both into the future and back into the past. Measured out. Rigid. Uncompromising. Unforgiving.
And much of it self-imposed.
We all know this version of time – it is the sea we swim in, the air we breathe; we live within it as if it were the natural order of things.
Most of us never question it. We simply count the days until our next ‘break’ – a holiday from time which becomes just another extension of it, because there is so much life we feel we must cram into such a narrow window. It passes before we even begin to relax into it and the countdown to the next ‘break’ begins. “Thank God it’s Friday” becomes a mantra for the headlong dash toward a hollow future that promises release yet endlessly delivers more of the same.
This is ‘fleeting’ time. The thin sliver of ‘no-time’ squeezed between the momentum of a relentless past and the emotional expectations of a programmed future. It is gone before we can savour it because past and future meet so seamlessly that there is scarcely a Planck’s width of existence between them.
The Layers of Time
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