Time, Time, Time, See What’s Become of Me (Time Series #1)
Last night, my cat Oscar started bugging me for his dinner at 3:45pm. I gently reminded him that dinner is served at 5:00pm on the dot. He didn’t take it so well. But, as always, Oscar was onto something. The days are getting shorter, and Oscar is connected to this change in light, much more than I am. To him, 3:45 is dinner time. No ifs, ands, or cat butts (sorry, couldn’t resist).
The realization brought me back into the wondering I’ve been doing around time and power, and in particular, racial power. As part of the Before We White series from White Awake, I got a chance to learn from Katrina Messenger, who spoke about “what has been lost with our collective induction into the patriarch capitalist and white supremacist culture.” One of those losses occurs through our contemporary sense of time:
“The mechanical clock to which we have enslaved ourselves collectively is not a reflection of the natural world. What nature reveals about a day is dawn, midday, dusk and night, which aligns with what is often called indigenous time. It is also the hours that ancient cultures relied on to divide the day for their prayers, rites, and other observances. Then if we can consider that time in nature is expansive and open, that it can expand and contract as needed, we can extrapolate what it must have taken for humanity to move from such a living and breathing time, to the cold hard time of [Harlan Ellison’s] Ticktockman. And we can deduce that it only could have happened through the use of force. No one would give up such a time as in nature, at least not willingly.” (Katrina Messenger, Before We Were White, Winter 2022)
There’s obviously lots to reflect on here, and a recent webinar with the team at Whiteness@Work on “Time, Power and the Workplace” makes me think there might need to be a Part 2 or even Part 3 of this time reflection. In the meantime, this journey has been encouraging me to reconnect with my humanity by honoring nature-time as an explicit form of resistance to clock-time. I’m starting off by honoring the moment the humidity and temperature drop to where I can close my doors fully and hear the radiators hiss, honoring the moon’s changing crescent and gibbous in homage to my Jewish heritage, and, yes, honoring my pets’ sense of time. But, sorry dear Oscar, for now, dinner is still at 5pm.
