kairos is “time married to action and context,” or qualitative time<\/a>, as opposed to chronos which is regular clock time, schedules and appointments and hourlong chunks in the online calendar. Sabbatical has been mostly about kairos I think, chronos has faded a bit into the background. Qualitative time also makes sense to me in my own research context, I think a lot about what and where and how people do things with the tools and in the locations and times available to them. So it is not surprising that I would think about my own qualitative time during my own sabbatical context. (Tho yes, navel gazing.)<\/p>\nI have done a lot of reading on sabbatical, mostly fiction but a fair amount of nonfiction too. Reading has always messed with time for me: time slows to a crawl if I’m reading something dull or difficult, or flies by when a book is so engaging that I can’t put it down. It feels like a luxurious use of time to spend a whole day reading, which I’ve done on a few occasions during sabbatical. Sitting on this front porch I read “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (and the rest of the stories in that collection as well). That’s the story that the movie “Arrival” was based on, a movie I loved though it made me so very sad. (the teen: “why do you [and dad] always cry at movies?” me: “because parenthood makes ya sappy, kid.”) The source material does not disappoint, and I found myself going back to it a few times as I was finishing up the other stories in the volume.<\/p>\n
Sabbatical feels like heptapod B time a little bit. I kind of had the whole thing planned out, and mostly it’s unfolded the way I expected. Deviations weren’t too awful, even the ones that were more negative than positive. There was a big structure but I felt sort of floaty in between. Scotland was like that too: we had an itinerary and moved between things to do, but there was some squishiness too. Family visiting is less structured more squishy.<\/p>\n
My sabbatical ends in 12 days. Our drive home from visiting takes 6 hours. The commute to work when everything on the subway is working well takes 20 minutes. My walk home takes 40 minutes. The semester starts (almost) 3 weeks after I’m back. My commute to the NYPL to the study room I’ve been using during sabbatical takes 50 minutes.<\/p>\n
Now I’m not on the front porch anymore. Now my sabbatical ends sooner than it did when I started this post. Do the number of items on the list of things I’d like to get done before sabbatical ends subdivide and fit neatly into the time remaining? Will I go back to my one hour of research each morning before heading into the library?<\/p>\n
I am not ready to go back.
\nI am ready to go back.
\nThese things are both, at the same time, true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I write this we are finishing up the second of our 2 summer vacations this year. We’ve been to Scotland, which was incredible, and also spent some time visiting family in northern New England. I am sitting on the front porch (vacation #2) thinking about time. And I realize I have spent lots of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,75,34],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-research","tag-time","tag-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3120,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions\/3120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}