A Mile In Their Roots: On Time
“… I was inspired to really expand my own way of thinking about perception and what it truly means. This additional sense I would like to propose is therefore not usually included within the parameters of officially defined senses. It lies even beyond the full list of seven senses that exist, but it is something I strongly believe should be included as part of how we and other organisms navigate and perceive life as an experience.
This sense is the sense of time.”
- Carolina Melo
— Friday, February 21, 2020 —
Today was my first official trial at attempting to “recalibrate” myself to the timescale of a plant, a species that operates in a drastically diverse timescale than that of humans. There were several things that really made an impression on me. The first thing that took me by surprise was how complicated slowing down actually is. So many of the movements we engage in on a daily basis are for a large part subconscious: When we walk, it is unlikely we’ll be thinking of which foot to put down first, or the angle at which we need to bend our knees in order to take the next step. Or if you’re reading and your face is itchy, you won’t be having a mental monologue about how you now need to send signals to your dominant hand to start lifting itself up to your face so that you can scratch that itch away. So in order to slow down a process that you usually never even think about, you need to actually think about it. You need to become conscious.
Since there is a lot of muscle memory involved, rationalizing those movements and paying attention to them can be quite disorienting. It reminded me a bit about how if you write down the same word over and over again, that process inevitably strips away the context one is familiar with, until the word just ends up looking like a nonsensical jumble of letters that couldn’t possibly make grammatical sense. Now the difficulty involved in slowing down comes partly from what I just mentioned about breaking down those subconscious movements into something conscious.
How truly ironic is it that a usually quick and effortless movement could suddenly become such a difficult and unnatural task the moment you start to think about it and slow it down?
The clip above was a video time lapse that ran over the course of ten minutes, and even though at some points I managed to slow down enough to approach an almost “normal” human speed, the result is still very unnatural and almost robotic.
T ricky timescale slipping away,
Slow to respond, as my cells grow.
Internal commitment that ticks and tocks,
Clock of biological movements.
Minutes to hours: Your hours to my days,
You could never beat my steady pace.
Elusive patterns of my intricate dance
Lost in time to the impatient soul.
“Author”: Monstera (Monstera Deliciosa)
