timeless living in a timed world
OR: burn the clocks
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”
— Milan Kundera
Last week, I pulled out the big blue tupperware crate, brimming with Christmas tree ornaments, from its basement hibernation.
Cracked open the lid to gaze at the old ornaments, each wrapped in tattered tissue paper, preserved in their tupperware time capsule. Objects that spark half-baked hazy memories, like they were from last night’s dream. I lined up the bottom of my palm with a paper hand cutout I made in kindergarten. In disbelief of time and biology. That I was once that small.
I carried the crate upstairs then went back to check if I missed anything. Staring out from the shadows, behind where the crate once sat, I saw a wooden wall clock. Impossibly old. An analog artifact from a grainy, unfamiliar time.
Once loved by grandparents, it beamed on the mantle of a bustling farmhouse living room. Watched over decades of Christmas breakfasts and Easter dinners, anniversaries and graduations, elections and wars, slow Sundays and rainy Mondays. Now, buried in basement storage.
The clock is four feet tall. Sturdy and solid. Made out of a dark marbled pine, textured with bumps and divots. The nails on the back are iron and unsymmetrical. Hand-carved into the body are languid maple leaves, bunches of grapes, branches, and vines. A small kingdom. The glass casing shares a similar ornate flair. Gold-painted flowers, a potted plant perched on top of a round brick door frame. The clock face is a weathered creamy white. Stained with age, like an old treasure map. Black bold Roman numerals announce each hour. At the bottom, in small type font,
“MADE IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY WM. L. GILBERT CLOCK CO. WINSTED, CONN.”
I brought the clock upstairs, set the time, wound it up. The gears began to click and whir. A universe of hardy engineering hidden behind plain elegance. Denoting each passing second with a strict, distinguishable sound. Tick… Tock.
At first, I cherished the sound of the seconds. A reminder to never forget. To never forget that life is passing me by. That time is slipping between my fingers like grains of sand slip through an hourglass.
The measurement of time is so old, so “obvious,” it's become imperceptible. We’re like fish, unaware of the water that surrounds them.
We’ve forgotten that months are arbitrary amounts of time named by Romans after gods, emperors, and numbers1. We’ve forgotten that hours and minutes and seconds are collective myths. We’ve forgotten that, at one point, time as we know it didn’t exist.
Clocks revolutionized our culture.
Before Time (B.T.)
“The clock dragged man out of the world of seasonal rhythms and recurrence, as effectively as the alphabet had released him from the magical resonance of the spoken word.”
— Marshall McLuhan
For our ancient ancestors, time wasn’t experienced as an abstract entity, separate from lived experience.
Time was natural. Free and unfettered. Guided by Mother Earth’s hands. Shaped by the arc of the sun and the wheel of the stars. Sweetened by the rolling tide of the seasons and the changing demands of the fields.
It was a less precise world. People explained how long something would take using concrete everyday actions: sneezing, milking a cow, shearing a lamb. A medieval person may say something takes a ‘Miserere whyle’ – how long it took to recite Psalm 50, the Miserere, from the Bible.
To gauge the amount of daylight left, people looked at the shadows cast by trees. Any conception of time disappeared in the dark.
Life was dominated by the rhythms of the natural world. People rose with the sun and went to bed with the moon. Days were long and busy in the summer, short and slow in the winter. The seasons dictated the day’s activities: spring for planting, summer for harvest, autumn for preparation, winter for rest.
While writing this, I reflected on my days hiking in the backcountry last summer.
How profoundly natural and properly human it felt to be untethered to the commands of the clock. To wake at the first glow of dawn, eat when I’m hungry, walk when I’m restless, rest when I’m tired. No need to hurry. Nothing to do but walk and admire.
My only quarrel with time was to make camp before the sun slunk below the horizon and a dim twilight blanketed the forest floor.
Without the watchful eyes of a clock, I stopped paying attention to the seconds and started paying attention to my experience. Experience that turned to honey, slow and sweet. Bathed in transcendence. Like I was in on some secret. Like I’ve been complicating life for so long when it’s so simple. Like everything I need is already with me.
When I forgot about the ticking hands of time and attuned to the rhythm of my heartbeat and the sun in the sky, my world became embarrassingly rich with life and color. I could hear the whisperings of the wind, feel the heat of the sun cut through my raincoat, smell the damp cedar and pine, chuckle at the red squirrels tearing through the brush and red-breasted robins on branches, tilting their heads as they questioned me.
Pausing at every turn in the trail, breathless with awe and wonder. “Wow,” etched across my lips. A smile breaking into an uncontrollable laugh. Too much mystery to funnel into my small head.
I felt liberated, like a genie who escaped his bottle.
Nature reminds me that time is a made-up concept, unimaginably far from the raw truth of reality.
Invention of Clocks
“The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish the hours!”
— old Roman poem
In 1370, the first public clock tower was built in Cologne, marking a turning point in the West’s relationship to time.
With the invention of the clock came the invention of time as an artificial, abstract entity. Separated from the rhythms of human experience.
The act of cutting time into discrete pieces could be used to control people. To synchronize the actions of the masses. Man became more organized, productive, and efficient2. But also less human and more machine.
We stopped listening to our bodies and started listening to the oppressive ticking of time. We earned independence from the sun but became irreverent toward the seasons3. We put ourselves under the thumb of a machine with its own demands. Demands unconducive to the flourishing of the human spirit. Demands that have only intensified.
With the evolution and democratization of the clock, man became increasingly obsessed with tracking time, saving time, serving time, and increasingly distant from the richness of the present and the promise of heaven. “Eternity,” Lewis Mumford wrote, “ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions”4.
Gone are churches built over generations, gone are paintings that took a life’s work, gone are books written across a decade5.
Productivity—how to do more with less—became our idol. We worship a world of seconds and minutes. The clock created a culture of speed and anxiety.
Today, ask anyone how they are and they’ll reply “busy”. Despite all our time-saving technology, we have less time than ever.
As
points out in his essay “Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster”:Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities.
Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the entire economy to a state of higher acceleration where you’ll be expected to do far more, at much greater scale, in the same amount of time.
Technology doesn’t liberate us with newfound freedom but encircles us, like a raging river around a lone rock. Adopt or “fall behind”.
We’re sold technology under the guise of convenience, but it seems to make our lives more distracted, busy, artificial, disembodied, and—dare I say it—inconvenient6.
Timelessness in a Timed World
"You can't use the Roman calendar to know when to fish. It's imposed on us for registering births and for baptisms, but it doesn't function for use in the forests. Bats tell us when to fish, when they fly close over the water.
…
In the cities, everything has to be at the hours. Here in the mountains, we give things time, without limits."
— Unknown
Just as I wouldn’t suggest throwing temper tantrums to reconnect with your inner child, I’m not suggesting a return to an archaic age.
We are better off with the miracles of modern life. But it would be remiss not to recognize what we have lost. That, despite our material abundance and advanced technology, there might be some ways we are less free than our ancestors.
A few times a year, I gorge in the timelessness of the backcountry trail.
But, in the trenches everyday life, I find timelessness in empty calendars and deleted alarms, in declined zoom calls and long phone-free walks by the lake. Doing work that I love. Consuming great art.
Creating experiences where I enter knee-deep in the flow of life. Slip into a realm where there is enough of everything. Where the boundary containing myself grows blurry, my sense of self goes forgotten7. Where the hours pass like minutes. Where the clock doesn’t stop, but I do not hear it ticking.
On weekends, close my laptop, chuck my phone in a drawer, and wade into experience itself. Let my body find its own language of calm and ease. Surrender to subjective time, how it speeds and slows, and sometimes, just sometimes, stops.
When that clock from William L. Gilbert’s 19th-century Connecticut company stopped ticking, I didn’t wind it up again.
I don’t want to hear the hands of time tick. I want to live in a way that makes me forget about time itself, because I’m drenched in the pure, vital present.
I can’t experience the infinite, trapped in a finite world.
If you liked this, you may also enjoy my piece on agency & inertia.
Thank you to my big brother
and James Bailey () for your time helping with this piece.My essays are entirely funded by patrons. If you value my work and want to support it (and get some exclusive content), the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.
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👋 what i’ve been up to:
Works and Days. Writing and reading and working. Scribbling in my journal till my hand gets sore. Watching lectures on Genesis and taking too many notes. Increasing my mileage again. Baking bread and puzzling and painting. Perfecting homemade hot chocolate. Going on chilly walks at night lit by the glow of Christmas lights.
I’m trying to savor my family time in my home. Once the year turns, I will be without either.
I found this clip last night of Noah Kahan performing an unreleased song live, and I must’ve watched it 5 times in a row whilst trudging through modules for my hunting license. Wild Friday night.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
Author Karl Ove Knausgard on being fully immersed in life:
"What makes life worth living?
No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference.
This is because children don't see the world, don't observe the world, don't contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don't distinguish between it and their own selves."
❓ question i’m asking:
How could I make the world a little more beautiful today?
📸 photo of the week:
My family’s Christmas tree I cut down & we decorated together. I like white lights more aesthetically, but the colored lights are very 70s.
Thank you for reading!
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You got all my love,
Tommy
Romulus named the first month, Martius, after his own father, Mars, the god of war. Followed by Aprilis, Maius, and Iunius, names derived from deities. Emperors named months, Caesar (July) and Augustus (August). September, October, November, and December – mean the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months – for the 10 month Roman calendar. All made up!
The clock, not the steam engine, was the machine that drove the Industrial Age.
Of course, the natural world cares little for our made-up idea of time and uniform work schedules. Mother Nature has her own timeless rhythms that we’re now put into frustrating conflict with. Ice and snow smother the streets but we have to be in the office for an 8:30 meeting! Rain pelts the window during our important zoom presentation! Darkness shrouds the streets but we still have four more hours of work!
The clock was invented by Benedictine monks to devote themselves more rigorously to prayer. But, it was leveraged by businessmen to devote themselves more scrupulously to the accumulation of money. “The inexorable ticking of the clock,” Neil Postman writes, “may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” Who would've thought an invention designed to bring us closer to God, has only driven us further away?
Cool example: The Italian artist Masaccio spent 40 years just making the door of the Duomo of Florence. Now, the idea of devoting your life to work on a single door is absurd.
It’s sickeningly ironic that technology promises to sell us our time back that it stole in the first place.
In general, it is a good practice to do things that make you feel small.
“I want to live in a way that makes me forget about time itself, because I’m drenched in the pure, vital present.”
Genius. Loved the whole thing and the way you brought it home.
Lovely writing as always. This is something I've thought about a lot lately. With the invention of time, we decided to treat every day of the year the same regardless of sunset and sunrise or temperature. Wouldn't it be better, in so many ways, to live in accordance with the seasons? Sleep more and eat dinner earlier in the Winter. Rise earlier and eat dinner later in the Summer. Rather than trying to fight each season with the same weapon (the clock), why not let nature dictate how we spend our days?
I admire your ability to write about a researched non-fiction topic without it coming across as textbook or unpersonal. It's something I struggle with while writing actionable essays about a certain protocol or test. But this is a great reminder for me that, regardless of the topic, you can always make it personal, observational, and playful.