I'm gonna stay on the 'time' tip for a bit, since it's really what's made it difficult to get into the site for the last week. I've had plenty to say about concepts and adjustments to schedules, but all those changes really make it tough to imagine the wedding and reception were just a couple short months ago. The kind of changes and experiences we've seen since then make me wonder whether the kind of 'standardized' scales we use, with little exception, are always effective and useful in the way we want them to be.
Bakhtin, for example, wrote about the 'chronotope' as a way of distinguishing linguistics and narrative characteristics according to ideas about time and space present in the culture from which stories originated. The notion that respective temporal and spatial adjustments can both characterize, and result from, unique communal experience, is especially resonant to me now, after months of upheaval and readjustment. Quite literally, spending weeks and crossing countries when traveling leads to 'big' feelings and expressions, and translating these signals back to daily patterns and charges is a process that deserves attention.
This whole thing should sound at least slightly familiar to anyone back in the varied rigors of a school's semester after a summer of more scheduled and leisurely daily work, or to those preparing again for Saturdays and Sundays now consistently full of student activities or regular yardwork or college and pro sports on TV. I suppose this is about habits, too: how long does it take before speedy- or expansive-seeming behaviors begin to feel 'natural' or normal? Still working to establish effective personal rhythms and itineraries here, I wonder exactly how flexible and adapted our sensibilities can be, and how influential our adjacent cultures and lifestyles end up.
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