I’m moving slowly through The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli not because it’s boring or anything, but just because I need time to digest these big ideas. I’m about 2/3 of the way through and just had to renew it (gotta love the ebooks from the library — I didn’t even have to leave my house to renew it!). I finished part one, which explains that a universal time does not exist no matter how much we like to pretend it does, and part two, which looks closer at how the universe works without time. Not gonna lie, it’s a little scary to contemplate a world without time. Now I’m about to start part three, which looks at where our ideas of time come from and what they’re rooted in. I’m looking forward to understanding that better.
So far one of the ideas that really resonates with me is that time is really about connections and relationships rather than some disconnected universal constant. Time is a coincidence — I’ll meet you when the hands of the clock point straight up (we’ll meet and the hands will point up at the same time), I’ll eat lunch when the sun is at the highest point in the sky, I was last there when the calendar said that number. At their core all of our clocks and calendars are about trying to connect ourselves to shared events, to each other, or to nature (the spin of the earth, shadows on the moon, our orbit around the sun, etc.) rather than aligning to some impartial universal clock.
I like that idea of connection because it’s a visceral one and also a very abstract one, and the combination of those two things leads to a lot of fun design play. It made me think about how to use one of the most fundamental ways of counting things, the tally mark, to count time relative to a meaningful event. It’s such a basic concept I’m sure I’ll come back to it again in different forms, but right now I like the idea of using a handful of markers and a blank page to tally units of time.
This kind of ultra-simple time piece could be used to count time relative to any event you like — I’ve always found our calendar that counts from January 1st to December 31st to be pretty arbitrary. School-year calendars that start in September feel a bit more real. But since I’m not in school at the moment (though 21 years of formal education certainly leaves its mark!), I could center my calendar on my birthday or the summer solstice or any time I like.
Tally marks could be added or erased, but for this experiment I wanted to use markers and a piece of paper, so erasing would be harder. To keep it simple, I’m going to mark time since a past event.
Each tally could represent any unit of time you like: an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, even a decade. I think weeks are quite useful, so I’ll mark weeks since my birthday. It would look something like this. (OK, I actually messed up the weeks count so this isn’t exactly right, but you get the idea! Also I did this example in Procreate rather than IRL markers + paper, it could work fine either way I think.)
I used colors arbitrarily here, I think it would be nice to refine it and assign the colors meaning. It could be weather, mood, work done towards a goal, anything you like. Or it could just stay arbitrary, the colors marking nothing more significant than the color I was in the mood to pick at the end of each week.
I like the idea of personalizing how we mark time. Why not define our own relationship towards time and decide which events are most meaningful to us?
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I’m still really enjoying my knot calendar from last week. Untying knots is something I weirdly enjoy (at least if I’m not in a rush), I find it to be meditative in a small way. The only issue with the knot calendar (besides that it’s only a fortnight long) is that it’s kind of ugly (it has a tendency to curl up into a chaotic little pile of string) so I keep tucking it away and then forgetting to untie it. So for a future version I’ll try to make it sing a bit more and also make it span a longer time period. I was also thinking could also be fun to make it more personal, maybe a wearable bracelet, necklace, belt, etc. I’ll have to think more on that.
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An interesting clock I came across is the Solstice clock from Animaro studio. In addition to a single hand that spins around a circle marking the hours, it also changes shape like a blooming flower every 12 hours. Lovely!