The speed of modern living, driven by smart phones, means we are used to judging the routines of everyday life in exact and discrete packets. The particular understanding of 3 minutes for your uber to arrive; a voice message that clocks a whopping 3 minutes; snoozing the alarm on your phone for 3 sweet minutes; a 3-minute read; a 3-minute walk on google maps; 3 minutes of being left on read.
When I’m home and the train is coming in 3 minutes, as long as I’ve passed the Dominos already and I’m not dragging a rolling piece of luggage, I know I have enough time to make it onto the platform at Ochiai and to the doors of the ninth car, which is the one I need to make the transfer to the Yamanote at Takadanobaba in another packet of exactly 3 minutes, with a 1-minute margin of error during peak hours of loitering students and confused tourists congesting the station.
A few months ago I wrote about an idea that J had suggested to me, about context-specific units of measurement being like different languages. I speak the heights of people in inches and feet, but the height of a futon can only be centimeters. Some measurements are Greek — bath water in Fahrenheit, men’s shoe sizes in any country or unit.
Time of course works in the same way. Consider the highly specific but seemingly universal situation of needing to have a bowel movement right before needing to catch a mode of transportation. Pooping on Japan time when you need to catch the one express train that runs every 27 minutes is so fine-tuned that you know before you start that you shouldn’t even try. (Also, you’re in Japan, so you also speak the language of toilet access — you’re unlikely to be stranded somewhere very long without a super clean place to plant yourself.)
Now for some 3rd-year grad student-level context conversion/cultural math. It’s your second day of vacation, and you’ve eaten a huge breakfast, a meal you normally don’t eat. You have 8 minutes until the diving boat leaves the marina. It surely will not have an ideal place to poop, unless you count the ocean, which you do not. You are usually fairly regular, but you’re on holiday, and your microbiome has jet lag. Fiji is chill, but scuba diving is not. What language does your gut speak at that exact moment, and on whose watch?
It’s the ninth new moon of the year. I disconnected my phone 10 days ago at Narita. Since then I’ve used it to take some notes and some basic bitch sunset photos, but it hasn’t connected me to anyone or anything else, and it’s not counting anything in units of 3 minutes.
I attempt to reset my internal watch from Japan standard time to two new time zones. First, Fiji time: I try not to worry about inconveniencing the staff at the resort when I’m a few minutes late for the massage that someone else has paid for. Happy hour just pops up randomly when the sun is about one sideways palm from the horizon, announced by a drum beat by the resort staff. A lilting-voiced man kindly removes a splinter lodged deeply in the sole of my right foot, and the amount of time it takes is somewhere between a smart phone’s the train is arriving and she’s mad at me.
(It also has an unexpected madeleine effect, bringing in time from the 1990s, of coming in from the deck with a sharp pain in the ball of my foot; of sitting through lunch in silent pain; of finally admitting to my father something had gone wrong; of the black behind my eyelids as he went at the skin with a pair of tweezers.)
On our second day a third time zone is introduced: scuba time. If Fiji time is fluid and Japan time is precise, scuba time is punishing.
At the end of a recreational dive, you start to ascend slowly, then stop at 5 meters below the surface of the water and wait for 3 minutes. This is called a safety stop, and it’s intended to slowly release nitrogen (which you breathe in compressed form in a gas mix strapped to your back) from your body. If you ascend too quickly, the nitrogen can bubble after you get to the surface, leading to decompression sickness, also known to anyone conscious in 1995 as “the bends.”
I only wear a watch underwater. A dive computer-watch tracks your dive time and depth, and it tells you when to make a safety stop. When you’re tired, stressed, cold, or have a headache, or you’re worried about the fact that your air could run out but are fully aware that worrying about it makes your air run out faster — but you also know you have to stay in the water for these minutes, or later you could be airlifted to a decompression chamber on another island — 3 minutes is a lifetime of anxiety, compressed.
You slowly watch the 3 turn to 2, then you bob down too far and the clock starts again, back to 3, slowly to 2, then it finally gets to 1, just stay just there, just right right right there, just waaaaaaait…foooooor…iiitttt
I, an old man, appreciated the 1995 bends reference.