Time on our hands
Last weekend was the Easter long weekend in Australia, a time when many people take a four or five day break and travel (hence my lack of a post last week). For my family, the destination was my parents’ home in the glorious southwest of Western Australia. We’ve been going for there for over twenty years, and it never fails to restore my soul. My days were filled with walking, reading, talking, thinking, and stitching. These interludes are when the pace in my life feels a little less frenetic, and that got me musing on the connection between time and our hands. To make it even more interesting, an article came into my email recently suggesting that maybe time doesn’t even exist at all! As someone who has always thought that a TARDIS parked in the yard would be simply wonderful, I could not resist diving down the rabbit hole.
Hands and time are linked in well-worn phrases. We talk about wanting to “turn back the hands of time” when we wish to return to a former time and place, perhaps with a tinge of wistfulness that our lives have passed too quickly. In my head, I see a vision of the hands on a huge clock being wound backwards as everything around it moves like a movie reel playing in reverse. We also talk about having “time on our hands” when we have some spare time, nothing on the immediate horizon that we absolutely must do. It’s an interesting image - the idea that you can carry time “on” your hands, rather than “in”, and then decide how to use it. Perhaps it’s linked to the idea that we used to wear time “on our hands” in the form of watches, although these are less common now that most of us carry a smart phone in our pockets. I’ve got some “time in my pocket” doesn’t have the same expansive feel as “time on my hands”.
My husband still carries the time on his hand :)
In light of these ideas, the article that came into my Inbox is particularly interesting. It was titled “Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers - but that’s okay”. The crux of the idea is that there are two major theories in physics that describe the fundamental way in which the universe works - general relativity and quantum mechanics. The theories work extremely well individually but they are thought to conflict with each other in some ways. So physicists have been searching for a new, more general theory that resolves these difficulties. Several of these approaches eliminate time as a fundamental variable. This means that time isn’t a requisite for the theory to exist - instead it emerges as a consequence of the theory. But even that is problematic, because it is not entirely clear how time emerges from some of these theories at all. Maybe time simply doesn’t exist??
Of course, that doesn’t seem to make sense at all in our everyday lives. It certainly feels like time moves inexorably forward. We are born and we die, with some finite amount of time in between to live our lives. The philosophical route out of the “there is no time” conundrum is to identify that “causation” still exists. In other words, one thing brings about another and thus a connected series of events gives the impression that time is passing. Thinking about time in this way, makes it really interesting to consider the question of how we each individually experience time - fast, or slow, or something in between.
People often say that time seems to pass faster as we get older. Psychologists suggest that this is in part due to the familiarity of daily life (https://theconversation.com/feel-like-time-is-flying-heres-how-to-slow-it-down-115257). When you are young, everything is new and exciting as your growing mind is constantly bombarded with novel experiences to learn and process. So life feels very “full” and time moves slowly. As we get older many of us settle into a routine, and thus one day feels much like the next and so time seems to pass more quickly. The “highlight” days like birthdays and annual celebrations come around much more quickly when all the days between them feel the same, and thus time seems to be moving faster. Another aspect of our busy lives is that sometimes we are so busy worrying about all the things we still must do, or relentlessly pulling apart the things that have happened in the past, that we simply forget to live in the present. When life becomes a blur of busyness and worry, it is easy to feel like time is simply passing too quickly.
What does all this have to do with our hands? Since I started Beautiful Stitches almost ten years ago, time has gone wonderfully slowly for me. Many of my friends complain that time is passing too fast, but my experience is the complete opposite. I wrote most of this post from the granny flat at my parents’ house. I was there only three months previously whilst teaching some classes for the Albany Summer School, but that already felt like ages ago. So much had happened in the intervening thirteen weeks!
For me, no two days are ever the same. Living the life of a creative entrepreneur means that my hands, mind and body are working together in different ways all the time. When I talk to other creatives, they will often express the same idea. There is something about working creatively that slows down time when compared with the repetitive nature of some other types of work. An “at home” day for me might include standing at my computer to write emails, prepare charts, and send orders, followed by a few hours spent wrapping skeins and dyeing threads, and then some time shooting videos for an online class. A teaching day involves loading my car with supplies, driving to the workshop venue, setting everything up, teaching the class and responding to student needs. It’s completely different to a home day. If you add to that all the usual domestic and family duties, as well as time spent with friends, no two days are ever the same. I’m sure it is the breadth and diversity that fills my everyday life that makes time move so slowly.
The second aspect of being a maker is that it is a great way to anchor myself in the present. When my hands are busy stitching, dyeing threads, or packing orders I am focussed on the task at hand and my mind is less inclined to wander. The mindfulness of these processes, the way they bring you into the present, is a sure-fire way to make time pass slowly, at least for me. There is a contrasting idea associated with “flow” here. When we are in flow, the state of being fully immersed in the focus and enjoyment of an activity, it can feel like hours spent on a task have passed in mere minutes. I think this is different to time passing quickly due to the routine of our days. This is actually a reflection of true mindfulness where the passage of time becomes unimportant. Total immersion in the present and the process makes you “forget” about time altogether. As a further consequence of that, the object that you made during that time is a physical record of the time that passed whilst you were immersed in the process. To completely focus on the task at hand, to take notice of all the details of it, is a great way to forget about whether time is passing quickly or slowly at all. You can simply enjoy the journey.
If we link this back to the idea of “causation” marking the passage of time, then my life is filled with multiple, cascading chains of events. Most days also include some time spent with my stitching. I love the idea that my hands work with the materials to record a series of tiny but important linked events - select a colour, thread my needle, anchor the tail, and then needle up, needle down, needle up, needle down, etc. I can’t work the stitches before I thread the needle, but I can choose to work the stitches in a different order, and thus like many aspects of our life, some of the causation can only happen in one way whereas other parts can follow myriad paths to end up at virtually the same point.
The outcome of my stitching is a piece of work that effectively records all those tiny, linked events. This is an idea that has always intrigued me. When I first built the website for my stitching business, I described my philosophy with the following words: “I believe that every single stitch you make is a beautiful stitch. Each stitch is a small brush of love on the fabric, which records forever the time you put aside to create something special with your own hands.” This is still absolutely fundamental to what I do both for myself and for my students and customers.
As I revisit these words, it occurs to me that just as our actions might leave tangible evidence of time spent, so too do they leave a mark on the hands themselves. In fact, our hands are one of the most honest records of the passage of time, giving literal meaning to the phrase “time on our hands”. A baby’s hands are soft and unmarked waiting to dive into life’s experiences. Mine, in contrast, clearly display evidence of my age and my life. Over fifty years lived in the harsh, Australian climate means that the backs of my hands are wrinkled and marked with sunspots. The palms of my hands though are soft and smooth, evidence that I don’t do a lot of hard, manual labour and that I use gloves to protect them whenever I am washing and cleaning. I have an incurable habit of burning myself on the oven, so it’s not uncommon for my hands to have a tiny healing burn scar in evidence. Sometimes too they bear the colourful splotches of a day spent dyeing threads. As I get older, my joints will likely twist and thicken as arthritis takes hold, just as they have for my parents. Even that will be ok, so long as I can still keep making and creating.
A baby’s hand ready to dive into life’s experiences (Photo by Anna Shvets via Pexels)
Exploring the link between our hands and the passage of time is a truly beautiful way to consider aspects of both. I find the idea that formal time might not exist deeply intriguing - that something so familiar might not be exactly what it seems. Regardless though, our hands and bodies interact with the universe around us to experience a series of linked events. The fascination of life is that there are so many ways in which that cascading series of events can evolve. And in a very real sense, the things that we do with our hands are intricately linked to those activities, be they mundane or extraordinary. It might be as simple as the cup of tea we make for a friend in a matter of minutes or as substantial as a hand pieced quilt that took years to complete. Whether time formally exists or not, we can’t deny that it’s the events that fill the space between birth and death that constitute a life lived. And our hands play an integral part along the way.
How to comment
I love receiving your comments and hearing your ideas! Making a comment is easy. Just type it into the box below. If you test it with “Preview” first, the name field will show “Not Logged In” (which is a system thing I can’t change). Never fear though! When you click on “Post Comment”, a dialogue box will come up asking for your Name, Email, and Website URL. The only field that must be completed is “Name”. It can be anything you choose - full name, first name, initials, nickname. So go ahead. Let me know what you think :)
