The right moment

The ancient greeks had two words acknowledging two different relationships with time. The currently dominant relationship was denoted by chronos: chronological, sequential time. This is measurable time, schedule-able time, time you can run out of.

The other kind is kairos: which is the time of the 'right moment'. This kind of time is un-plan-able, unmeasurable and certainly un-scheduleable. If you miss this kind of moment, you can't work nights to make it up. This is organic, flowing time which has nothing to do with clocks, but everything to do with life and with successful endeavour. It's the kind of time I wrote about recently in The still days.

We are much misled by clocks and calendars listing a day by hours, quarter hours and minutes as if all time were equal and to be used equally. More and more we seek a window in the diary to get together with friends, sort through the loft, get out in the fresh air. But what of the right moment? Time is not a bland, homogeneous raw material to be allocated by quantity alone. How often do we end up re-scheduling because when the time comes it is so clearly not the right moment? In the case of sorting through the loft, I'm into double figures. Such is the dominance of chronos in my life though, that the next possible window for tackling it is more than a month away.

As it happens, I really rather like scheduling things. Not because I like my life to be all planned out, but because scheduling something is a bit like having done it. It gives some relief from the pressure of not-done-ness. But by scheduling I sacrifice my freedom to take the right moment, which always arrives unannounced and never waits.

A calendar with great stretches of empty hours looks unsettling. What -tick- are -tick- you -tick- doing -tick- with -tick- your -tick- chronos? Busy people are important, busy people are contributing, busy people don't have to defend their worth. But busy is a drug, and it can dull you to the sudden appearance of the right moment.

By all means, keep busy; but planning to be busy is what kills the magic of the still days. You might even achieve more by drawing back from schedules and remaining open to the rightness of a passing moment.

The still days

I always embark on January with a dash of wistful regret. The most delightful days are over for another year. Not the warm and busy abundance of Christmas, or the late night partying of New Year, fun as it all is. 

What I really treasure are the still, nameless days stretching between Christmas and New Year. The days when you sail about in an uncharted ocean of time with no plans and no commitments, only abandoning pyjamas if the weather outside looks tempting or you run out of milk. Meals happen piecemeal, and life swims in and out of imaginary worlds reading, playing with Christmas toys, having pointless conversations with loved ones, watching TV and napping on the sofa.

In our hyper-productive, artificially lit, instantly communicating world, these are the only days that you are allowed to waste. The rest of the year the clock is king. Alarms drag us to and fro as we hurry between work and school, dentist's appointments, a booked session on the badminton court. We are hunted through our days by the clock. When we're late we're anxious and apologetic; when we're early we hustle to find a productive use for the extra sliver of time.

Before the industrial revolution and factory working, before clocks and electric light, perhaps the whole of winter was like the still days. With only candles or soft oil lamps to push back the night, it would flood in sooner, you'd go to bed sooner - probably waking in the night for a while before drifting back off to sleep again before morning. That unmeasured, unscheduled time enclosed in night would be an enchanted time for musing, talking with a wakeful bedfellow, making love.

Modern sleep is almost a chore, something you need to fit in enough of before the alarm goes off. If you wake at 2am feeling refreshed you'll likely panic about how on earth you're going to get back to sleep in time to get enough sleep before the alarm goes off at 6, and how exhausted you're going to feel all day if you don't.

There's no rest anywhere except between Christmas and New Year. We pack our weekends with rewards and chores that we couldn't get done in the week, and on holidays we generally go off to have adventures: making the most of our time. But it doesn't work. We need to live more off-clock and I just can't wait till next December.

I'd like to institute my own watchless weekends. I'm not sure if it will work over such a short period of time, or if we can do this as a single household, surrounded by open shops and rumbling buses. How much of the still days is in the air? The noise level in the street? The number and demeanour of walkers in the park? But I'm going to have to try. The clock's been in charge for 400 years and that seems enough. Let's make space for organic time, dreaming time, human time. 

Don't k'nex the new year

My son has coined an expression which we have found very useful: k'nexing.

It refers to a time when a new toy (a k'nex roller coaster set) was rendered irrecoverably disappointing by youtube videos. Excited by the possibilities, he explored youtube for k'nex builds. There were some amazing things. We both ended up watching quite a lot of footage of people's amazing ingenuity. After which our own set looked pointlessly feeble.

He and I are veterans of the conversation about why we haven't got as many X as person Y. He got that the major k'nex constructions we marvelled at were built after years of practice and thousands of pounds spent on bits. But it was more than the ache of envy, which never interfered with his love for his wooden train set when other people's sets were bigger. It was that we had both been distracted from the k'nex itself by the dramatic scale of the constructions. Our little set simply couldn't satisfy our wild imaginings, although it would forever remind us of them.

Inspirations have energy, which you use to start the process of making them real. But this energy drains away over time and it is finite. There are three ways around this - only doing very quick projects; dividing big projects into a series of small endpoints and fresh beginnings; or else be more in love with the medium than the project. This last way seems the best to me, but it can't be pulled out of the hat to meet a goal.

For example, I make ceramic sculptures. I don't have a lot of time for it, and it's not something that's easy to leave half done and come back to weeks later, so in between I browse pinterest for lovely ceramics and daydream about ambitious projects. But this panoply of inspiration doesn't stop me enjoying the single small project I eventually engage in. Because I love clay, for it's own sake.

I also make 2D art in various media. I enjoy this too and so I also pin a lot of cool 2D art. But it's dangerous: I'm in love with the art, with the finished products, not the medium. I like colour, I like texture, I like compositional drama. But it's not so much about the paint, or the software, or the paper, it's about the finished effect. And that makes pinterest dangerous for my 2D work.

It's good, sometimes, to look up and see the mountain peaks of possible, but we are not dream creatures and we cannot fall upwards through pure desire. If you can't retain pleasure in the step by step, in the rocks and plants that are here underfoot, or the rise in the land a hundred yards ahead it's a miserable journey, and one you probably won't finish.

My new year's resolution is avoid over-large resolutions. So far, I'm doing okay.

How does anything ever get done?

Minds have ideas and minds make plans. Most people intuitively agree that minds, ideas and plans are insubstantial, with no solid physicality (until we act on them).  But how can that action happen? Without any kind of hand, how do minds affect the stuff which makes up the physical world? We can't lift a cup of tea with thought alone, or even warm the water. So how does the decision to jump actually generate the chemical and electrical nerve signals involved in an actual jump by actual legs?

Some evidence seems to suggest that ideas and plans actually follow (if only by a fraction of a second) the action they intend. I find this a bit depressing, because it says that my sense of being a conscious creature with free will is entirely illusory: just a story I tell myself to explain why I've done what I did.

But perhaps the experimenters weren't looking in the right place. They were looking in the brain, the location designated as a safely scientific venue for the mind. But maybe we actually do the thinking with the heart, or the gut, or something else entirely, and only process our decision in the brain. The trouble is that questions of mind shade into spooky and religious territory and is a bit of a dangerous subject for serious scientists.

But mind really does seem to affect body directly, causally and repeatably in the placebo effect. Nobody disbelieves in the placebo effect (where people get genuinely and measurably better in respond to pretend medicines). Even hard-headed pharmaceutical companies fund additional work in every trial to discover how much of the apparent effect is caused by their medicine, and how much is (merely) placebo.

However, as far as I can tell, little serious research is conducted into how placebo operates - although there is a bit of fun dabbling into whether red or blue pretend medicines work better for particular ailments. Instead of being a focus for study of the interface between mind and body, placebo is simply used as a kind of hygenic screen separating the real (ie currently understandable) science from the weirdness, subjectivity and the other inexplicable 'noise' that life imposes over the pure conceptual framework of hard science.

Science serves us well, but few of the remaining questions are more fundamental than how minds  gain real traction on the material world. Surely it's time to risk raising the screen and find out what is really going on. We might even find out how to lift a cup of tea by thought alone.

A hidden dimension

Pairing up opposites orders the world so that we can think about it. Hot versus cold. Nice versus nasty. Screen time versus real world activity. Very little is black and white, but we can place things along the dimension which stretches between our opposites - is this more geeky, or more fashionable, and where shall we put geek-chic? We do this in all kinds of contexts from plotting data on graphs to scoring movies with 0-5 stars.

Thousands of these dimensions exist running across and alongside each other. Sometimes a big, clear opposition can contain within it another, subtler one, the operation of which may slip by unnoticed. Saying 'yes' versus saying 'no' to things holds within it the dimension which stretches between Adventure (by which I mean the attitude of enthusiasm for new opportunities and experiences) and Focus (which, as Steve Jobs famously said, is about saying 'No').

Recognising that direct tension exists between Focus and Adventure isn't easy, because so many adventure stories feature a rugged and focused hero who appears to collapse the dimension down to a single point. This (generally male)  character is not distracted by physical discomfort, not disheartened by difficulty and remains fixed in his purpose. He  is supremely focused on achieving his aims and we admire him for it.

Confusingly he seems terribly adventurous as he penetrates jungles, navigates oceans, and scales mountains, but of course he is not. He has adventures, sure, but they serve to conceal from the reader the relative poverty of his inner life, which is hyper-focused on his objective (finding treasure, escaping from baddies, you know the kind of thing). In the jungle our hero doesn't really notice the plants, except as obstacles, or sources of food, shelter or poison, and on the ocean he doesn't think about the life in the waters below, unless one of them sends up waving tentacles to pluck him from his raft.

Adventure stories follow our hero's focus, because focus provides a plot line, onto which can be threaded a bunch of adventurous exploits. The writer and the reader both savour this adventurous window-dressing more fully than our hero. We mull over his escape from the giant octopus when it's over, but he's busy tackling the next part of his 'adventure'. How could you even tell a story about someone who is not focused on an aim, who explores any opportunities which come their way? Their plot is continually being drawn off in tangents. It's all trailers and no movie.

I like watching trailers, but I have experience of seeing movies which helps me imagine the kind of experience the trailer is trailing. If you've never seen a movie, a trailer can't tell you what it's like, to park your body in the dark for 100 minutes while your mind visits a bright imaginary world.

We love adventure, we intrinsically say 'yes' to new things. We are curious, exploring monkeys and we are drawn to what we get offered by adverts, pinterest, facebook. It's addictive - you get a little imaginative rush from each new idea. I spend probably too much time pinning things that inspire me - new techniques to try, new ideas to mull over, new places I might explore. But although Adventure beckons, it's only a starting point. To actually have the adventure takes focus.

If I'm going to decoupage that chair, I need to stop pinning, gather materials and devote several hours to the project, over a period of a few days, until it's finished. Otherwise I just have a big mess. Or an item on a To Do list which never gets done. More often than not, I stay where I am, comfortably imagining trailers of a life I'm not actually living.

So, now I know that 'saying yes to life' is not actually an absolute good. Indeed, it's not even possible. There's too much life: saying yes to any of it involves a massive amount of saying no, something which never makes it into the fancy quote jpegs. But Focus-No is the necessary setting for the gem of Adventure-Yes, and if we neglect it the meaning of our adventures falls away.  

What is luxury?

Luxury has had to shuffle sideways. Once it took great skill to throw plates, and a matching dinner service was a luxury. Now machines make a perfectly nice 18 piece dinner set in a range of colours for less than £15. Transporting food used to be slow, difficult and expensive, now you can buy one bag of oranges and get one free. Year round, because air freight has shortened distance and mixed up the seasons. If luxury is the rare and the precious, what is luxurious now?

The words used to sell luxury now are artisan, handmade and craftsmanship. They all speak of time spent paying attention. We are so rushed, multi-tasking on our consumerist hamster wheels, that the real rarity, the precious luxury is attention. And it is a safe refuge: attention can never be mechanised. There is no machine to allow us to produce more attention per minute.

We don't like to admit that we need attention, especially as adults. If we don't get enough from friends, relations and colleagues, we can pay for beauty treatments, or set up mentoring relationships, or even write a blog (ahem). Research is piling up that the experience of real-life, real-time (and ideally in-person) attention is an important factor in health and longevity. But what of the new luxury: attention goods? Can we really absorb the focus and skill of the potter from the pot? Or do we just enjoy the knowledge of it? Most people seem sure that seeing a gig or a match played live is a very different experience from the DVD. Being there has something extra - an 'atmosphere' is created by the communal focus. But what about afterwards?

Does attention leave a trace? When someone has spent hours knitting a blanket, is there something additional in the blanket itself; something not present in one made by a machine in a factory and barely glanced at? Or is it just the knowledge of that attention, and the care it implies, that makes something precious to us?

Knowledge charges traces of the maker's hand with meaning. We see the swirling pattern on the base of our mug, and we know it was made by a practised sweep of the cutting wire freeing it from the wheel on which it was thrown. We think of the potter attaching the handle, drying, firing, glazing and firing again. We can savour the attention lavished on this mug at one remove, in our imaginations. But does it exist beyond that?

If the trace of the maker's attention is real, does sustained attention from the same person throughout the making leave a different trace than serial attention paid by different makers? Does the attentive trace spring from a developing relationship between maker and made, or is it merely a kind of patina bestowed by repeated applications of attention? Do years of honing skills add to amount or change the nature of the attentive trace in an object - can you apply more attentive force as a master than as a novice?

A research trip to a fine craft gallery is clearly required.

Mending magic

Have you noticed that if you mend something, it often feels more precious afterwards?

There is some magic in mending. I think it goes like this:

Something gets broken, or torn, or worn through. You consider getting rid of it. Sometimes this will make you sad and you decide you can't part with it, and mend it instead.

By choosing to mend you are consciously recognising the object's worth, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps for the times you've had with it, perhaps a blend of the two.

In the act of mending, you make this explicit. You pledge your time and effort to your relationship with the item. I think, by not simply replacing the mug, or the jeans, you acknowledge the separate identity and value of the item, its beinghood. It may not be alive, but it is starting to shade into agency and to become a player in your life. It asked something of you, and you answered the call.

I have also noticed this during times in my life when money was pretty tight, and mending wasn't a declaration of love, but of need. I often liked the jeans better after patching than before. They had become more personal, they had something of me stitched into them. I have even felt a flicker of this this about sharpened pencils (it always seems to be a major production to find the pencil sharpener, which might explain why).

You give things life by mending them. The mend does not have to be tailored and invisible. Indeed, the animating power of mending benefits from some level of visibility. When you publicly confirm your commitment to the item for all to see, it's like a wedding.

To a lesser extent this is also true of cleaning. Check out 'boro' and 'kintsugi' on the internet, you'll get lots of beautiful images of humble items mended, and better for it. Nothing is permanent, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. And that is an invitation to dance.