“there’s no time. there’s no time” the nurse kept saying to the man who wanted to know when he would be able to leave the ER. she meant that she couldn’t give him an accurate prediction, that the amount of time his test results would take to come back was out of her control.
i took a little trip to the ER on Friday, which ended up being a false alarm, and was struck by how urgency and timelessness could exist in the same place. when nothing was “happening” the ER reminded me of the DMV scene in zootopia — with sloth employees, the glacial pace and fundamental ambiguity of bureaucracy.
“there’s no time in here.” as in, when we can’t count it, or bend it to our own wills, it ceases to exist, it’s run out.
yet, time can be made, time can be taken if its yours, if it belongs to someone. we make time, sounding like we’re fashioning something out of existing material. make time, make a cake. they really took their time, as a compliment or a lament, but from who?
the irony of bringing Jenny Odell’s book, Saving Time, is now dawning on me. if anything, for those 28 hours, i gave my time away.
Odell writes holding “a deep suspicion that we are living on the wrong clock.”1 She distinguishes between chronos: “the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future”2 and kairos: “means something more like “crisis,” but is realted to what many of us might think of opportune timing”3 she says, “it is kairos more than chronos that can admit the unpredictability of action….” that can “recognize the fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, where our agency also lives.”4
hearing the nurse respond to my ER neighbor, who did not speak English, i noticed a vague contempt she seemed to direct at him. i recognized Odell’s observation that some people / institutions get to exist in time, own time, and others’ time is disposable. “one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.”5 this describes all the invisible labor that makes some people’s leisure possible. the inverse is also true, the frantic pace of the nurse/the ER meant that the man had to slow down, had to wait around for a long time. and wait for what, exactly?
there’s no time, but maybe there’s something else.
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she also offers a distinction made by philosopher Josep Pieper between horizontal time — “a pattern of forward-leaning labor time punctuated by little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work.” and vertical time, true leisure “one whose totality cuts through or negates the entire dimension of workaday time”
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This post certainly resonates with me as a retiree. I have far fewer “have to’s” on my calendar, which opens up infinite “choose to’s.”