Interlude: the time of things

Consider, for a moment, the life of a stone. To us humans, a stone is a symbol of permanence, of immutability. Yet, as contemporary physics reminds us, even stones are events: occurrences unfolding on a temporal scale that vastly exceeds the duration of a human life. What we perceive as solidity is, in truth, an exceedingly slow process of transformation.

This perspective invites us to rethink our relationship with time. We live trapped between two extremes: on one hand, the urgency of the everyday, where minutes seem scarce and precious; on the other, the vastness of geological time, where our entire lives are but brief flickers. Between these two poles, we navigate with our limited perceptions, creating meanings and narratives.

What’s interesting is that the very act of observing alters our temporal experience. When we’re absorbed in a task that fascinates us, hours can pass like minutes. Conversely, minutes spent waiting in line or staring at microwave digits can drag like hours. Psychological time rarely coincides with clock time, and this discrepancy reveals something fundamental about the nature of human consciousness.

Consider conversations. A conversation is also a temporal event, but of a peculiar nature. It doesn’t confine itself to the moment when words are exchanged. A meaningful conversation continues to unfold in memory, in subsequent reflections, in the subtle changes it works upon us. Sometimes, the true significance of a conversation only reveals itself years later, when we finally understand what was really being said.

This elastic quality of time manifests in curious ways in the contemporary world. Digital technologies promised us more time through efficiency, but paradoxically created a sensation of constant acceleration. We respond to messages instantaneously, but lose the capacity to let ideas ripen. We have immediate access to all information, but less time and ability to contemplate it.

There’s also the question of boredom, that state our era treats as an enemy to eliminate. Yet moments of apparent temporal emptiness can be profoundly generative. It’s often when we’re not focused on anything specific that the most creative associations emerge, the deepest intuitions surface. Time “wasted” might turn out to be the most productive, but productive in a sense that escapes conventional metrics.

Returning to stones: they teach us involuntary patience. They exist, they transform, they eventually become dust, all without hurry or anxiety. We, creatures of briefer time, oscillate between urgency and procrastination, between the fear of losing time and the desire to stop it. And perhaps it’s precisely in this tension, in this paradox, that the richness of human temporal experience resides.