Virtual Reality & The Palindrome of Time
It is so weird — calling myself a writer. Never have I waited with such anticipation for words that want to come forward in me to arrive. It’s like — so what now. I wait. Hmmm… But for how long do I wait? Fifteen minutes. An hour. A day. I don’t even know how to tell time anymore. In this global circumstance, days make no difference now. Outside of my time zone, I can never really tell when I’m supposed to show up for a Zoom call with anyone. And these Zoom video calls are happening more and more these days. I keep flaking out on my new writing partner in Louisiana because I keep forgetting that the Central Time Zone is two hours ahead of me except that actually means that it’s two hours later than in the Pacific Time Zone where I live. When is something that’s ahead of you going to arrive later than you? It doesn’t make sense. This is all according to the UTC which actually “stands for” Coordinated Universal Clock, not a proper acronym mind you, and this system was renamed from Greenwich Mean Time or GMT. At least that’s a straight acronym. The Coordinated Universal Clock does not even account for daylight saving time — spring forward, fall back. Yes, I said that correctly; it’s just daylight saving time, no “s.” And one state, Arizona, and all of the American islands in Pacific Ocean and in the Caribbean sea are just like fuck it; we’re not moving. So, for half the year time zones should have a “D” for daylight in the middle instead of an “S” for standard. I am not sure if everyone actually knows when to use this practice. From March to November, we are saving daylight for the ends of our days. That said, for all our new virtual meetings, times should all be listed with a “DT” and not a “ST” like I’ve been seeing. I can feel my disorientation starting to creep in; my breathing is shallow. My speech is clipped. Okay, breathe, Michelle.
Once I’ve settled on the hour, I still can’t feel myself inside of an hour. My days are slow, but the hours are fast inside and I can’t keep track of days of the week. How many times have I said, ‘how did it get to be this hour?’ As a therapist, I’m supposed to have an embodied sense of the 50-minute hour, the industry standard belonging to us. I should know that when I look at the digital clock and it reads 3:45, I’m supposed to have finished up this imaginary arc of my session, start in on some type of summary and look toward next week’s scheduling. All so I can breathe, get a drink of water, jot down some notes for later dictation and be ready for the next session at 4:00 in ten minutes. Right? Right.
As I kid, I deplored learning to tell time mainly because I hated fractions. And luckily time-telling does not include improper fractions, which I completely loathed; still, it took me a while to get savvy enough with angles and fractions to feel comfortable reading a clock. No one ever learns to tell time on a digital clock. I’ll leave this here. I’ll come back for it later. Having achieved my second grade competencies of telling time and comprehending fractions, I vaguely remember making a note to myself to orchestrate my life in such a way to never have to actually know where 3/8th’s of an inch falls on a ruler.
Now we use digitization as our time telling venture but we started out with an embodied spatial practice — the analog clock. The very definition of analog explains it best as a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things. In learning to tell time analogously, we learned relationship. Like music, we learned downbeats and what we could arrange comfortably in the space before the next beat. We were more connected to syncopation, or the offbeat, so we knew more intimately what couldn’t be squeezed in the space of a minute, an hour, a day. In my conscious awareness, seeing 3:15 numerically on this page holds no real relationship to 3:30 save for the fifteen minutes I can subtract easily in my head. But, looking at the short and long hands of a clock, my body can sense the full right angle between 3:05 and 3:20 — a quarter’s worth of pie. I’ve decided to divide it; life is short. Thank you, but no thank you, Erykah.
As a counseling student, there are digital clocks in every lab to help emerging counselors tell time. I had to run out immediately to purchase myself a small analog clock because I was always running over or under my allotted time for each of my sessions. Now, I can achieve most of my clinical time management goals looking at an analog clock, because I am now in relationship with time. I am with time and time is with me. Listening for cadence and pulse; we are symphonic, in concert. No one ever learned to tell time on a digital clock.
In these moments, time is rather disconcerting. The hours are long but the days are short or vice versa. The structures we’ve adopted to tell time actually flummox and complicate our relationship to time and task. The Gregorian calendar, which sets a different number of days to each month is just strange, especially come February. A lunar calendar would offer twenty-eight days for each month and one free day per calendar year. The capitalist idiom equating time and money is bygone and threadbare of meaning displaced by communal wonderings, difficult to monetize virtual offerings and homeschooling. It forces a specific tasking or productive rendering offbeat and often devoid of natural rhythm. We have always had enough time and now maybe a little bit more in the slowing down of quarantine with no more and often less money to show for it. Though, in the last month, we have likely prepared baked goods or shared food with our friends, family and neighbors and that feels more like time well spent. Take a breath here.
In the late 80s, I remember being a kid and hearing about how virtual reality was the wave of the future. Virtual reality was a world predicated on the suspension of disbelief. And here we are, just thirty years later and our reality is mostly virtual. The word virtual explains a thing, being or existence that is almost but not quite — somewhere in between approaching and completely hypothetical. Now, time is somehow palindromic. Our reality is virtual — virtual is reality; the same backward as forward. It makes me think of the sankofa bird; our only way forward is back.
I wonder why we say tell time; as though we, in our smallness, have the ability to dictate the boundaries of time. Our ancestors listened for or kept time by connecting to the natural world. They looked at the position of the sun in the sky. When someone said let’s meet at dusk — no question — and you were seen at the appropriate hour. If you were wondering about when something would happen, an elder would remind you that whatever it was was going to happen in due time which was a sufficient amount of time between your asking and its appearing.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos (καιρός). Chronos refers to a chronological and sequential ordering of time and coincidentally is the name of a widely used time and attendance software and workforce management system. Kairos offers the opportune time or the moment of truth for action. If you were unclear about the right time to complete a task, we have an old idiom to remind you to strike while the iron is hot. Somehow we all know when that exact moment occurs. If you thought for a moment about leaving this earth without doing a very important task, that bucket list item you’ve had tucked away for years or the work you and only you were called here to do, my mother would sing that old gospel song, ‘While the Blood is Running Warm in Your Veins.’ Time remains harmonious, embodied and very clear.
Our freedom exists in the choices of what we put inside the rhythm of time. In our collective presumption, we try to tell time something time already knows — that you cannot change times past; you can only act now to change your future. In this virtual time, we regain our footing and some degree of choicefulness about how we spend our time. We have an opportunity to embrace new or maybe old ways to keep and listen for — time. Breathe, here and hear.
I hope you have found something useful here. Now and in the days to come, please accept listening for time as a strategy for liberation. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect in your witness.
May you be deeply well,
Michelle
