“Stress is a perverted relationship to time.” John O’Donohue. I wrote this quote down last year while listening to a conversation recorded between John O’Donohue and Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, back in 2008. It spoke to my heart in a way that only a poet like he could. I didn’t learn to read time until my early teens and still today the concept of time perplexes me. It often feels like that frightening old toy, the jack in the box. We wind it up, get all tense, and then it jumps out. And of course it does, after all, we have squished it into impossible shapes, pulled it taut, and hidden it away behind clock faces and alarms as though we don’t want it to be what it is – a wild thing that cannot be tamed. We do not control time, only our relationship to it.
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Reflections on Stress and Time
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“Stress is a perverted relationship to time.” John O’Donohue. I wrote this quote down last year while listening to a conversation recorded between John O’Donohue and Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, back in 2008. It spoke to my heart in a way that only a poet like he could. I didn’t learn to read time until my early teens and still today the concept of time perplexes me. It often feels like that frightening old toy, the jack in the box. We wind it up, get all tense, and then it jumps out. And of course it does, after all, we have squished it into impossible shapes, pulled it taut, and hidden it away behind clock faces and alarms as though we don’t want it to be what it is – a wild thing that cannot be tamed. We do not control time, only our relationship to it.