I learned a new phrase tonight from someone in my Monday Night Creative Writing workshop: Einstein time. This means, you own your time and you choose how you spend it. The concept is discussed in The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I haven't read the book yet, but this concept of owning your time came up in workshop because we read a beautiful short essay by Ross Gay, one of my favorite poets. His essay is titled Loitering. The author is at a cafe, having bought a coffee, and he is nearly dozing in the sunlight in the window.
Here is an excerpt:
"I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.
"…The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”)...All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.
"For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. …
"…Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is."
The contrast is clear between being a good-citizen-consumer who spends their time for the good of the business and the putterer who may not even be consuming while he is apparently (but only externally?) unproductive. In fact, is this the contrast between capitalism and democracy?
Another writer we studied in workshop tonight is Laraine Herring from her piece On Being Stuck:
"Writing is a slow process. It is not typing. It is a synthesis of past, present, and future. It’s the condensation of an idea, a vision, or an experience into a focused sensory experience on the page. It’s the deepest form of sharing—one imagination to another. It’s the most intimate form of communication—mind to mind, heart to heart. This synthesis does not happen in one sitting, one week, one month, or one year. It happens slowly over months and years of paying deeper and deeper attention to your process and the fruits that come from that work."
Tonight we all noticed the synthesis of these ideas surfacing and intermingling over 1.5 hours of writing and thinking together. This past Spring, for February, March, April, and May, I chose to write a poem a day and post it within an online community for accountability. My sense of my own purpose felt full and grounded and driven by imagination and creativity each day, even when I wasn't writing. I was spending my time keeping aware and tending to the world around me with my imagination. I made daily choices in using my time so that I preserved the space and time to write, to look at the sky, to watch the leaves in the trees I planted nearly 20 years ago now in my backyard, to notice how the rabbit overnight had clipped off the Nasturtium flowers perfectly and left them on the deck by the flowerpot.
I was compelled to search for the term "Einstein Time" and I found this fascinating analysis of time in an essay titled The Grand Illusion in Lapham's Quarterly by Jim Holt, author of When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, and a member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board:
"Most physicists and philosophers today agree with Einstein that time’s passage is an illusion; they are eternalists. But a minority—who call themselves “presentists”—think that now is a special moment that really advances, like a little light moving along the line of history; this would still be true, they believe, even if there were no observers like us in the universe.
If there is one proposition about time that all scientifically inclined thinkers can agree on, it might be one due to the nonscientist Hector Berlioz, who is reputed to have quipped, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Which to me means: write, create, read, think. Want to go deeper? Watch this video of social psychologist Cassie Holmes, PhD talk about time poverty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2IJTn_FOVo&t=75s
