Fear of time that flows inexorably and does not return, and of time that is not enough. From the ancient Greek “Chronos” (time).
It’s a very difficult phobia to understand, as it is extremely subjective and still little addressed by the scientific world. Also called ‘the prisoners’ disease', for obvious reasons prison inmates can live with this perennial feeling, but it is also linked to Alzheimer's or the terminally ill, aware of a battle that will come to an end.
I fit into this phobia as I have felt this sensation since childhood, like an omnipresent cloud that punctuates the passing of minutes. Even now that I am writing these words, and despite the fact that I have taken days off work to have the right amount of time to finish this project, I feel this passage of time that is never enough, this restlessness of having to hurry that never leads me to enjoy things or the here and now. The idea that things have an end and that what I enjoy will end or even worse, will change, altering my daily routine that is so comfortable but also stagnant.
Over the years I have worked a lot on this phobia, finding some useful solutions. The first was to move from a linear idea of time to a circular one.
The purely Christian-Western idea of birth-life-death, with all its crucial points (study-graduation-marriage-making children-leaving an inheritance to grandchildren) is something extremely pressing that afflicts all disillusioned new generations. Thinking in a circular way, organising my life in cycles of 3 or 5 years by giving myself specific goals chosen by me and not by society, helps me a lot.
Another method is not using my wristwatch for long periods if I am constantly looking at the time. Of course, I also help myself by not looking at my smartphone (when I can) for a few hours. Once I stop, I go back to the watch, but lately I don't feel the need. Finally, the work I do helps me a lot to enjoy the “here and now”, as opposed to the effect I had in recent years of constantly using my photocamera to produce memories. In the last 3 years I have reduced the use considerably and apart from a few works, for the rest I use an analogue camera and wait years before developing the negative. There would be many other thoughts about the perception of time in my autistic functioning, the image I have in my mind is more that of a rubber band than something marked and precise, but there will surely be another occasion in the future to talk about this, perhaps with a separate project.
PNG, 4000x4000, 300 DPI.
Post-Photography, AI Cooperation by Mirkolis, 2023/2024.
Rodeyo
