Dear reader, it has been awhile. However, like I said in the About, I’m not trying to contribute to the economy of content. This is a place to simply lay out and work through thoughts, whenever those may come up. Typically they are about my confrontation with the post-modern life as I age into mid-life, but really it’s just about organizing thoughts—an outlet for the times of contemplation and truth seeking. If you read and enjoy—great! I am no profound essayist, but I find the need to contemplate and this my place to do so. I thank you for thinking along with me. In this piece I’m in debt to Heidegger and to Byung-Chul Han’s translated monograph, The Scent of Time (2017).
I’m anticipating a few exciting trips with friends this spring. They are both international and time consuming, wedged between the schedules of flying, family obligations, and work. Despite the financial bearing, or stress caused by balancing these trips with everything else, I need them because they are important for gaining time and for negating the restless life we lead these days. That is, these moments are important for slowing time down and contemplating, bringing more grounding to life.
I am convinced that contemplation among friends is a form of friendliness and connection. In the World of Work expression is often in production and efficiencies. Any attempt at gentleness is fake or forced as time is used up. But true contemplative lingering with friends creates a connection and lets things pass between one another. There is agreement instead of intervention, lingering with one another gives time.
Heidegger’s later philosophy strikes this mood. At one point he dwells on the idea of a stroll along a path. One in which you are not going anywhere, necessarily, but rather in full contemplation as one lingers. The path symbolizes a dwelling that needs no goal or purpose, operating without a teleology. It is a time of reflection, something opposed to the calculative thought of our technological times—the thought of work.
Like walking a path with reflection, gathering with true friends with a hesitation toward being overly active, the space acquires a vastness. Our intent is widened beyond the efficient thinking of needing to order the world to be ready for our desires. Instead we have moments to remain still in rest. To navigate what we have instead of trying to alter it.
I used to have some level of anxiety when I gathered with old friends and the conversation would slow. I deemed this awkward because it appeared to be something so distant from what we always shared in our youth. Instead of constant moods of joy, excitement, or humor I assumed we were growing apart and our shared moods were taking a hit because they were much more hesitant and less active. This created a fear of change, a fear of losing the connection we all had for so long.
In retrospect, it turns out that instead of being attuned to the hesitation that denotes a pause to linger and contemplate I was attuned to the need for efficiency in the setting. We have limited time, we need to get the most out of one another that we could. And with that way of thinking time was consumed and not given.
Heidegger has posited that we have a tendency to “de-distance” ourselves. We catch site of the next point in time and are immediately looking for the next one after that. Byung-Chul Han calls it ‘zapping’ from one point to the next. That in our need to escape boredom of the interval between point A and point B we panic from the nothingness and zap ourselves as quickly as possible to the next point. But this acceleration blinds us to what is truly momentary.
In those times of hesitation among friends I felt the anxiety to zap from one thing to the next. I was too uncomfortable to stretch out into the duration and appreciate the given time. But now this time has become sacred to me and I look forward to it.
In exercising this hesitation, it creates a staying with things. This is not the time of work. Instead it is one that creates the tension that keeps us from going adrift. In this interval time is where we find something sacred, something that prevents us from a distraction where we are seeking the next hot thing. The contemplative gaze goes easy on one another, allowing us to be in our own space, together. I imagine my friends looking at me funny as I take in our pauses with reverence, not just picking up my phone to avoid a scary emptiness, but connecting with them and the world around us.
To live this is to find a small freedom. I try to keep this in mind more often in my life, not just when gathering with friends. To try to live a more contemplative life, where deeper thinking and lingering is prioritized over acceleration and zapping. This does not mean being lazy, nor does it mean to just recharge to get back at it, but to actively spend time seeking ‘truth’ and beauty instead of trying to quicken the interval between points in time.
We live in a world that does its best to keep us from this freedom, a time where narrative tension has been erased to keep us focused on efficiency and haste in an atomized world. I fail just like everyone else in the face of it all. I don’t just naturally live a contemplative life. In fact, I’ve had to engineer a few things to keep me from distraction, such as apps that lock me out from mindlessly scrolling social media or clicking on sent distractions throughout the day.
I think that simply the occasional triumph of remembering that the dominant most efficient and productive way of being is not required is a very freeing idea in itself. That in the end just the awareness of being caught up in the waves of our culture will provide the moments of pause and hesitation that can bring you back to the contemplation of beauty and friendship and family and the other focal practices in our lives. It’s a never-ending process, but the more value we put on the contemplative life over the restless one the more attuned to life’s wonders we might ultimately become. At least that is an argument I find deeply convincing, as well as one I’ve experienced at this stage in my own life.