This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Exposure. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
There are two kinds of time: time you notice and time you don’t. If you’re looking at your watch every two minutes, doesn’t matter if you’re in cooking class or on a date or editing photos or running over the Williamsburg Bridge—you’re not in it. So if it is something you genuinely want to be in (and it may not be, in which case you should get out), it can be helpful to unburden yourself of time.
Back in the discussion of surrender, I mentioned that being a good improviser includes the ability to recognize that circumstances “are ripe for your success right now and then invent the way to seize them.” Very often, part of what you’re inventing is a method for reshaping your experience of time.
One of the most interesting things about the two kinds of time is how close each kind is to being the other. When I was a kid at the park or the city swimming pool—one part exercise, one part enforced socializing, just really pure bliss for the anti-athletic introvert : ) —I could spend almost the whole time counting down the minutes, until it was almost time to go; at which point someone would have come up with a game that wasn’t boring or found an equipment room we weren’t supposed to be in or discovered some other way of making time seem suddenly wildly precious.
Conversely, we’ve all had the experience of being mesmerized by a movie or play or concert for the first two-thirds and then, maybe for no discernible reason, checking out. One kind of time can slip into the other almost of its own accord.
The factors that turned me from “no sports pls” for the first 23 years of my life to “yes I can meet up in three hours when I’m done at the gym” are complex, but if I had to pick one thing, it’s that the nature of time when I’m moving my body changed. At first this was because I moved only in places where the whole pleasure of the moment submerged any indisposition, as in riding my bike at sunset on the beach. But as, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, I got more in touch with that movement itself, as it became more beloved to me, the ability to slip out of time got more portable.
This came to my notice in Tuesday cycling class this week—how conscious I was of even the first minute. It was unusual, and I felt some anxiety, because it was going to be a long 45 minutes if I was counting each one. But then I remembered the formula for giving time the slip in cycling class, so well-worn in this body. It goes like this: Close your eyes. Hear the music. Sync up your breath. Dance.
Coming Tuesday: When to get out.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram: @leggy_blond.