There are many ways to reclaim these moments, ways to cultivate practices and rituals to disrupt the tyranny of capitalist time, ways to give us more control over our own lives. What I offer below is a very incomplete list, but each will help open a gate into a new way of understanding time and our relationship to it.

Look at the moon, not the finger pointing to the moon:

Try to look for the moon every night for the next 28 days. Learn where it rises and memorize its various phases, and use a resource to figure out where it is when you don’t see it (try this one). Then, come up with some simple ritual that helps you connect the experience of noticing the moon’s presence. For instance, I say “hi” to the moon when I see it. It’s kinda silly, but it works.

Time-free zones:

My best friend and I had a ritual whenever we went camping in the mountains together. We had to take a ferry to get there, and the moment we boarded we both turned off any devices we had that would tell the time, and oathed to each other that we wouldn’t turn them back on until we returned. Try something similar at the beginning of your next weekend, vacation, or trip. Once you’re ready, hide all your clocks until you need them again. This can be tricky at home with others and even harder if you are constantly using a smartphone. For the former problem, just tell the people you’re with what you’re doing; for smartphones without the option to hide time (i.e. iPhones), put a tiny sticker over the time display at the top and a sticky note over the time display on the lock screen.

“Everyone sees noon out their front door” *

(*a French proverb)

Noon, the point where the sun is half-way through its progression in the sky, is completely different from 12:00 pm. Try to figure out its half-way point (“true-noon”) where you are: there’s some math involved, but an even easier way is to use a calculator used for setting up sundials here. And then try for a few weeks to see that time as the mid-point of your day, rather than noon. You can also develop a little ritual around it, like ringing a small bell or just going outside for a minute during true-noon.

In the time it takes for rice to cook:

Humans naturally develop other ways of marking the progression of time besides clocks. One of the most common ones in many animist and pagan cultures, or those where time-discipline never fully took hold, is to measure time according to some common daily activity. For instance, several cultures have measurements aligned with cooking, like the amount of time it takes for water to boil, tea to steep, rice to cook, or bread to bake. In industrialized cultures, we usually use timers and don’t think much further about it. But anyone who cooks can tell you that you don’t need a timer, and with some regular practice you can intuitively guess when something will be done. Try giving (not paying!) attention to how you intuitively feel time this way, using some regular activity around cooking. Just make sure you don’t look at a clock!

Meet me in the gloaming*:

(*an old Scottish word for the time between sunset and twilight)

School and work are not the only ways that time is disciplined into us. We often discipline each other through our social interactions. When a friend is late we may feel like they’ve violated our personal time and schedules, when we’re late, our friends, family, or lovers may berate us. Instead of trying to make your friends (or yourself) more punctual, try arranging dates, parties, or other meetings with people you care about without using clock-time as a reference. Tell your mates to meet you at the bar when the sun sets, or after they’ve eaten dinner; ask your lover if you can meet them just after the moon rises, or after they’re done with work. And see how your relationship with them changes and expands when “lateness” isn’t an issue.

Feasts of the sun and moon:

Many modern Pagan and animist traditions have revived pre-capitalist ways of marking the seasons and the changing of the year. One such way is celebrating the “eight stations of the year”, which are the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four “cross-quarter” days which survived into many Catholic cultures (Imbolc: 1 February, Beltane: 1 May, Lughnasadh: 1 August, Samhaim: 1 November). Whether or not you ascribe spiritual or magical significance to these dates, they can create a stronger connection to the cycles of the sun and the seasons and help disrupt the Roman-Imperial calendar we use now. You can also do the same with full or new moons, which further disrupts capitalist time because the lunar calendar doesn’t sync up with the solar calendar. Traditional Thai, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic, and many other calendars are all lunar-based. Consider adding one of these to your wall to have a sense of more ancient methods of calculating time.

Each of these suggestions based on the principle of cultivating a relationship with other forms of time. Bodily rhythms (waking, sleeping, menstruation, hunger and digestion) create their own time. Growth cycles of plants and animals, seasonal weather patterns, tides, springtime melting of snow, and others are also other patterns of time which held much more importance to our pre-capitalist ancestors.

Shifting the way you see time can also shift the way you see the rest of the world. Regardless which of the above you try, you may find that other things change in your life, helping you reclaim a sense of time outside the time of Empire and the tyranny of its clocks.

Rhyd Wildermuth