{"id":8806,"date":"2024-09-18T18:17:16","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T22:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/geologist-turned-psychologist-ruth-allen-on-the-12-kinds-of-time-and-how-to-be-more-fully-alive-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-09-18T18:17:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T22:17:16","slug":"geologist-turned-psychologist-ruth-allen-on-the-12-kinds-of-time-and-how-to-be-more-fully-alive-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/geologist-turned-psychologist-ruth-allen-on-the-12-kinds-of-time-and-how-to-be-more-fully-alive-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen on the 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,\u201d Nobel laureate Wis\u0142awa Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem \u201cPossibilities.\u201d<\/a> Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time \u2014 we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of stars, our transient lives bookended by not yet and never again. Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it slows down when we\u2019re afraid and speeds up as we age<\/a>. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way waiting twists the psyche<\/a>. It haunts us with its demand for meaning<\/a>. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of space, the substance we are made of<\/a>: \u201cTime is a river which sweeps me along,\u201d Borges bellows down the hallway of eternity, \u201cbut I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while we have no control over time itself, we do have a choice in how we orient to it, how we inhabit the moment, how we own the past and open to the future \u2014 a choice that shapes our entire experience of life, that ossuary of time. And just as it bears remembering that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives<\/a>, it bears remembering that there are infinitely many ways of being in time. <\/p>\n

In her altogether wonderful book Weathering<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), geologist turned psychotherapist Ruth Allen explores some of them as different ways of anchoring into our own existence. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Harvey Weiss from Time Is When<\/em><\/a> by Beth Youman Gleick<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A generation after Paul Goodman taxonomized the nine kinds of silence<\/a>, Allen taxonomizes the kinds of time in a celebration of what she calls chronodiversity<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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Time is so diverse, and experienced so differently between subjects in the present, that any prolonged effort to constrain what time is falls apart. There is the time of insects who live no more than a day, and the time of tortoises that outstrip our own. There is the time that for me is saved, but for you wasted. There is the time that can never be equal in an unequal world, where you can relax and I have to work or vice versa. There is the time we experience in chronological order (or chronos<\/em>) but there is also the qualitative experience of \u201ceverything in its own time\u201d time in the moment (or kairos<\/em>). There is time as it is experienced at altitude, which is different from time at sea level, and there is the time that shifts and bends with longitude. There is the slow time of youth when ideas and experiences are rushing clear and fast like spring water, creating an endless and expansive present, and Christmases that never come, and the fast time of elderhood when a lack of novelty speeds life up, racing forward like an arrow to a target without hesitation or deviation. There is the time of our psychological experience, the relative time of Einstein, and now also an entropic time rooted in what physicist Carlo Rovelli calls our \u201cquantum ignorance.\u201d \u201cWhen we have found all the aspects of time that can be spoken of, then we have found time,\u201d Rovelli declares. For now, then, we do not know time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Discus chronologicus<\/em> \u2014 a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print<\/a> and as a wall clock<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Drawing on the work of Marcia Bjornerud \u2014 another uncommonly insightful geologist<\/a> \u2014 and her concept of timefulness<\/em>, Allen considers how living into and between these different kinds of time can help us be more fully alive and more meaningfully connected (which is, in the end, the only thing that redeems our mortality). She adds:<\/p>\n

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Time is not a resource we have for cashing in. True timefulness<\/em>\u2026 is to live in awareness of the dynamic and unpredictable array of times that co-exist within one life, as well as the intersubjective nature of time between all individuals. To live it well, we may need to break the temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relational and contingent upon each other in specific and localised ways. In this way, time becomes unique among individuals who co-create its meanings and who give it vibrancy and liveness through their interaction with each other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dive deeper \u2014 into the subject and into the body of time itself \u2014 with 200 years of reflections on time<\/a> from some of humanity\u2019s greatest minds, from Kierkegaard to Nina Simone, then savor the lovely vintage children\u2019s book Time Is When<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cI prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,\u201d Nobel laureate Wis\u0142awa Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem \u201cPossibilities.\u201d Our preferences, of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}