What time is made of

Patience is not my biggest virtue. If you ask my spouse, he’d probably say that patience isn’t a virtue I hold at all, and that is mostly accurate.

In my defense, the world we live in doesn’t exactly declare patience to be desirable to begin with. Speed, efficiency, ability to multitask well and fast: these are all aspects we are praised for at school, work, and even in personal relationships. This is as much true in business as it is in not-for-profit endeavors, and the predictable result is burn-out and stress.

But there is another way, and I was powerfully reminded of it yesterday.

My adult daughter and I had jokingly bought romance novels from the 1950s at the local thrift store, in Danish. My daughter is Danish, like me, but does not speak the language well because of decisions I made during her childhood that I will forever regret. Mea culpa. The point here being: she speaks well enough to read the books out loud, slowly, clearly, if hesitatingly, and to mostly translate them accurately. So this is what we did.

For a while, we were both in the Scottish country-side with clear blue skies and purple heather, following the privileged childhood of the hero, with his chiseled jaw and sharp wit. And during this while, I was more in those places that I would have been reading it myself. Every sentence was savored. Every image produced slowly, and recognized with joy. We were constructing the narrative together, the imperative of the translation necessarily slowing time down.

I am not saying, read everything in a language that is not your own to produce this effect. Communication and connection are intrinsically related, and we need to connect as much as (or more than) we need to slow down.

But it made me think of an anecdote in Leila Billing’s work on time and toxic productivity, in which she describes a meeting between a group of women communicating only via text. Patiently waiting for each other to finish their point, to read, to compose a considered response. Here there is communication and connection. Time slowing down enough to follow the speed of thoughts, realizations, and relationships.

This is what time should be made of: trust, breathing, thoughts unfolding, bodies at ease. Time slow enough that we can be.