Skip to main content

 

Taking Time to Make Time

 

When the thirty three year old Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Pope Julius II would impatiently ask him when it would be complete. The artist would reply “when I am satisfied". Rodin took 37 years to compete his Gates of Hell. The Taj Mahal took 22 years, two more that the Great Pyramid at Giza. The Great Wall of China took 2000 years!

One could say that these were commissioned by the rich and powerful, but then there are the living root bridges of Indonesia and North East India made by villagers for their own use that can take at least 15 years to complete.

The concept of time has changed very dramatically. Time was once measured by the movement of the sun. Daytime was for activity, night for rest. The sundial measured the hours of the day. Most people would just guess the time of day by looking up at the sky.  Hourglasses, measured candles, water clocks were some of the devices that measured time independently of the sun. Bells marked the eight daily prayer times of Bendictine monks and gave the name to clocks from the Latin word for bells – clocca. The mechanical clock made natural time completely irrelevant. People started carrying time on their wrists, charging their services by the hour, using alarm clocks, and travel schedules.  

The clock itself was divided into hours. We still maintain the Babylonian system of twelve and its multiples. They counted the divisions of the four fingers with their thumbs arriving at twelve and its multiple, sixty. 

The quartz-crystal clock invented in 1928 by W. A. Marrison, changed yet again how time was measured. Quartz crystals can vibrate at millions of times a second allowing time to be measured up to a millionth of a second. Races at the Olympics can be won by one millisecond.

This ability to manage time, gave birth to the desire for speed.  Until recently when Covid slowed things down, speed was the measure of success. Cars are marketed for the speeds they can reach and how quickly.  We design faster air travel, bullet trains, speed boats. Employees are stressed with the need to meet deadlines. Multiple Choice Question examinations judge ability by the speed of processing answers. We are told of the wonderful rush of adrenaline when we ‘floor the pedal’ in our daily tasks, our exercises, our educational growth.

Daniel Kahneman in his bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, emphasizes the need for both fast thinking -often automatic actions, such as judging distances when driving, and slow thinking- deliberation to thoroughly examine a matter, to understand all possibilities, before coming to any conclusion. It may be as simple as parking a car in a tight space or making a decision about a business strategy. Thinking fast means the mind will turn to prior solutions. Thinking slow allows new ideas to emerge.

There is a general perception that slowing down is wasting time or indicates laziness, while science suggests it is an important way to replenish the mind and generate new ideas. It is possibly more productive than communicating at the rate of 1,000,000,000 bits a second on one’s digital device. 

Art, even when a work is made at great speed as Sadequain and Picasso did, evolves out of a painstaking process of practice and formation of ideas. Art and photography can, quite literally, stop time by capturing a moment. We are fascinated by slow motion images as they allow us to see the details we would otherwise miss. 

Here lies the value of slowing down - to notice, observe, process, evolve our responses, whether we are paying attention to our children, our friends and life partners, or conducting market research, writing a journalistic report or planning a strategy for peace. We save time by making time. The Swiss saying goes “No shortcuts today, I am in a hurry”.   

 

Durriya Kazi

August 28, 2021

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

 

 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Decorated Trucks of Pakistan

International Institute for Asian Studies / Association for Asian Studies / Asia Committee, European Science Foundation First International Convention of Asia Scholars Leeuenhorst Conference Centre, Noordwijkerhout , Netherlands , 25-28 June, 1998 Panel: “ Shaking the Tree: New Approaches to Asian Art” / Session: Decorated Transport Decorated Trucks of Pakistan Durriya Kazi June 1998. Karachi Meaning is always in process, what has been called “a momentary stop in a continuing flow of interpretations of interpretations”. This paper pauses at some facts and some observations about decorated trucks of Pakistan , a subject that has elicited tantalisingly few studies. Pakistan is often presented geographically and thus historically as the corridor of land between the mountain passes that separated the near East from the plains of India . Less mentioned and more significant is its identity as the valley of the River Indus which has historically ...
What have we done to our youth? At this year’s Art and Design degree show at the University of Karachi I was taken aback by the darkness that lies within the sweet looking cheerful young men and women graduating this year. There is always a degree of emotional turmoil that is expressed through art. However, this year’s work shook me to the core and I asked myself, what have we done to our youth?       Despair, depression, suicidal thoughts, a childhood of abuse, night terrors, stray dogs, gender labels were transformed into beautiful artworks, but reflected a deep anxiety. Art is a natural vehicle for personal expression. How many of those hundred million or so young Pakistanis have similar anxieties that are never heard? Have we disempowered our youth? Youth the world over are struggling to be heard. Malala Yusufzai for education, Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikes for climate, March for Our Lives for gun control.  At the ages of 17 and ...
  Patterns of Infinity If we probe deeper into any phenomena – astronomy, the cycle of life, mathematics, we arrive at the concept of infinity. It is the most abstract of abstractions, although mathematicians have tried to devise ways to measure and rationalize infinity. Trying to make sense of the infinite is a bit like trying to contain the uncontainable. Contemplating infinity inevitably led all civilizations and all religions to the concept of God.   The art of most religions express God as an image or a symbol, perhaps to make it more accessible to devotees, leaving it to the philosophers to come to terms with the nature of infinity. The exception is Islamic Art, which from its earliest expressions of Quranic calligraphy, to the architectural design   of mosques,   made infinity the cornerstone of its expression. While most art continued on a human centric pathway, culminating in the cult of the individual, Islamic art remained rooted to an interconnecte...