TIME (I)

I’ve had jobs which have taken every fragment of my time. Jobs which have meant frightening schedules with every minute of every day accounted for: calls, with no breathing time in between; back to back meetings with just enough time to walk between them; flights timed to get to specific locations for those meetings; lunches that consisted of smoothies sucked down for rapid sustenance; or working lunches that left no space for breath or enjoyment of food. It was a “joyless urgency,” as Marilynne Robinson calls it (quoted in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks).

When I attempted to recover from that style of life, I remember making myself do walking meditations in hopes of regaining something I couldn’t perhaps even articulate - normalcy, peace, or a sense of myself. I made myself notice leaves and flowers, and closed my eyes under a canopy of trees I would walk under, to feel the slants of sunshine that nudged through.

While I have always been somebody who hates “wasting time” or when people or absurd tasks “take my time” unnecessarily, I hadn’t paused to think of what that meant. Time is all there is. We should be possessive of it, because it is us.

As always, I love discovering the works of thinkers and artists and writers gone by, who have puzzled over the same nuggets of thought as I do. I was delighted to discover an essay by Borges called “A New Refutation of Time” (written in 1946, discovered in one of my frequent reading dives into Maria Popova’s brilliant The Marginalian which is a beacon onto beautiful works one can then look up and read more of), in which he writes: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

He ends by writing, with characteristic slyness: “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

30h x 30w x 0.75d (inches); acrylic, ink, lipstick, paper on wood-backed canvas

This piece is part of the Hong Kong Arts Collective Summer Exhibition held in Hong Kong, August-September 2023