Dawn or dusk? Photo credit: Isabel Wong
I have a playlist called “compost” meant to house all the songs I’ve grown tired of and don’t want to actively listen to anymore but also don’t want to delete and risk losing forever. Someday, I imagine, nostalgia or historical curiosity or desire will compel me to return to these songs, and, like compost, they will find use again, perhaps just with a new purpose.
Time is a key ingredient in this scheme, contributing just as much to the process as peels themselves. Yet, time is often in short supply. Too often, each day is spent in hyperdrive jumping from one activity to the next, all the in-betweens zipped away.
Once, my CC professor and I were talking about post-graduation plans and my uncertainty surrounding them. She recommended I take some time to deliberately think about what I wanted to do. Block off the time. Put it in your calendar if you have to. No distractions.
My professor encouraged me to sit in time, curl myself within its blanket and simply think. Research in the pause. What are my goals? Research through the pause. What do I want? Sometimes stopping is a confrontation. Sometimes we need time to sit in our thinking. Other times, we need time to take us away.
We regularly set aside items in hopes they’ll return changed. Too hot food, wet clothes, words. Almost every time I submit a piece of writing, a breath later and not even completely out of my chair yet, I’m struck by something I want to change, am already reopening the document. Releasing a project for even an instant allows my brain to recalibrate, to reconceive.
These periods away from research are contributors too. Each of us, whether a first-year undergraduate or a Distinguished Professor, have meetings to plan, dinner to make, children to pick up. We can only dedicate so many hours to conducting research. Yet these hours washing dishes or folding laundry, these hours spent not “actively” researching but chopping vegetables or tucking covers under chins, can spark with inspiration, finally work loose a dried, crusted stain. Research requires synthesis, dreams’ collection of bits of present and dashes of past all mixed up and re-welded. Time facilitates this “inactive” research, this dreaming machinery.
Time, then, is more than a passing metric. It is a resource we can draw upon, an active participant, a facilitator. It is a conversationalist, helping us build and strengthen connections, absorb and cultivate ideas, lending another set of nimble fingers to a tangled knot of yarn. The more time available, the more opportunities one has to sit and stay with an idea when needed or to take a step away when a new lens is required.
Often, I feel like I’m scrambling to braid threads into comprehension before a deadline, no time to take a step back, let alone meander outside for a stroll to clear my head and consider a new approach. During class, my CC professor, a postdoctoral fellow editing her manuscript for publication, laughed at Descartes’s tacit suggestion that we all lock ourselves in a stove-heated room for a day to philosophize. No one has an hour, let alone a day. Time is a luxury. To have an entire day to think, to wander in and out and away, is such an extraordinary occurrence, a rare opportunity.
Many are calling this pandemic a hard reset. A breath of, in some congested cities, literally, fresh air. As we continue to rethink what we once believed was set, I am hoping we will begin building in time to stop, not only to think more deeply but to walk far away. For time is more than just a sharpening, tightening telescope or a ladder that allows us to go beyond the closest, easiest hanging fruit. Its powers also lie in what it can do when not actively held in hand, when not dedicated to thinking about research right here and now. Time need not be a competitor racing past, a bully with a wall of a chest. Rather, it can be a companion, a co-worker, a dance partner. Let it choreograph with you.