The Timelessness Trilogy 2

The Seasonality Secret

On the streets of Tokyo with Jeff Austin - @tokyoforhgeries

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Last week I introduced a trilogy on time - on timelessness. The first issue dealt with how culture codes for time - how the Chinese have the long history, how the Swedish have the fika, and how the Japanese have ichi-go ichi-e.

I’ve had a particular fascination with the Japanese, and Japan, for some time now, and it’s led me to craftsmen like Jeff Austin and Craig Mod. The former, a photographer and writer that runs @tokyoforgeries - some of the best Tokyo street photography I’ve ever seen. Jeff is a friend of a friend and we’ve struck up a virtual relationship of sorts - I haven’t yet had the pleasure in person.

He sent me this photo - told me he took it with me in mind - and that it was mine - an original. I won’t say I didn’t blush.

The latter, Craig Mod, an infuriatingly good writer who walks and talks his way across the world with companions, old and new. Craig is an American by birth, living in Tokyo - a love affair with Japan that has lasted more than 25 years. Craig is the creator of Ridgeline, among other things, and writes goodness-gracious level sentences so often that it feels like an injustice somehow.

“Time is yours, he said, and it was — time, ours, for the next week as we walked across Bali. Time and sweat, so much sweat…Stink was also ours, as were home cooked vegetarian meals and mangosteens and shared cigarettes and crossword puzzles and sleeping side by side on elevated wooden platforms and…a single flat white coffee so perfect and mythic and unexpected it can only be explained as Indonesian jungle magic.” - Craig Mod

Setting aside the surprising, but welcome, cup of Indonesian jungle magic, what stuck in Craig’s mind during this particular walk, was precisely what we’re dealing with here.

“But time — that was the key. Take away everything else and you’d still have Walk and Talk sorcery, a sorcery built on time.” - Craig Mod

As often happens when writing this newsletter - staging day suddenly became read Craig Mod day. I was supposed to be blissfully writing words, in flow - no editing allowed. I ended up reading Ridgeline 188 (twice), 143, 144, 194, and 199 - all before having written a single unique word of my own. It makes sense to me that this particular affliction chose to inflame while writing about time, and how we spend it.

In Transmission 143, Craig reminds us that no matter who you are and where you are, time never stops ticking away.

“If the Cotswolds is done, complete, finished, static, then in comparison Japan feels endlessly dynamic, like an ice sculpture shot through by bazooka. This may seem counterintuitive, but a host of qualities — the aging population, the changing face of countryside towns and villages, the shuttering of long-run shops, the scars of the (relatively) recent wars — all lend Japan a feeling of recent and continuous churn.” - Craig Mod

That dynamism creates a sense of inescapability.

“I kept bouncing between these two mindsets — one of the continuous and well-established surface churn of Japan and one of the seemingly static view the Cotswolds provided. - Craig Mod

In Transmission 199 - walking Tokyo on New Year’s Day. Another year had come and gone in the Pacific.

“…a way to measure distance traveled. I’ve sat here many years on this very day, perhaps in this very seat. I’ve felt tremendously alone in those days. And yes, I’m alone here now, but not alone. At least not like how I used to be.” - Craig Mod

In Transmission 194, of meeting a mensch - Kevin Kelly, after a panel discussion on the future of media, and how media has changed over time. But really, about how people come into our lives.

“Put tangible things into the world, spoon in a dollop or two of vulnerability, do this again and again, and if you don’t find yourself communing with good people, then I’ll eat my shoe.” - Craig Mod

In Transmission 144 - how ephemeral even our most famous towns are - Venice is being consumed by water as we speak.

“…Venice has all the classical qualities of a thing to be cursed: It’s gorgeous. Rightly revered. Every turn astounds. The lack of cars, the absurdity of the city itself (the fact that it is supported by a billion petrified telephone poles laid in mud a millennia ago), the fact that the buildings largely conform to an admirable standard of beauty and texture — all of these features create a place that should no longer exist, and yet does exist…” - Craig Mod

Nothing reminds us of the ephemeral quite like the seasons.

“This was good time, rich time. Heavy rains and thick air time. More time is always better than more money, wrote Kevin a decade back, and it’s empirically true. Slow walking allows for wide eyes on the lookout for wild flowers. Each day a new Tiger Bouquet collected mid-walk, stems cut, dunked in a little glass on the edge of our home for the night.” - Craig Mod

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All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time. I hope that in this post you are able to connect whole human health, time, and the seasons - in whatever form they appear.

Here are 5 Tools used in this post.

• Craig Mod’s indispensable Ridgeline

• One of our greatest pieces of People & Place media ever - Japan with Masa

• A book that I can’t believe I’m only now encountering - Heat from the timeless Bill Buford

• Perhaps - if there is such a thing - the modern internet’s most famous blog post

• Coming into the Country - from another mensch - John McPhee

Are you interested in getting access to all of the tools used in every post on People & Place? Let me know in the comments.

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The Waiting and the Working (Winter Scallops)

Time - how soon it passes, how soon we forget, and how small our ability to fully get a grip on it. When Oliver Burkeman had the hunch that later became Four Thousand Weeks (and what a hunch it was) he asked his friends how many weeks they thought the average modern life is.

“One named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks - 310,000 - is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.” - Burkeman

The answer is about 4,000 weeks for most of us. Four thousand. Let’s consider this extreme brevity in something we understand better - money. Remember back to a time when $4,000 seemed like an unfathomable amount of it. Perhaps you worked a particularly lucrative summer job - tree planting, laying foundations, or the like - and all of a sudden you had a rather nice windfall for someone so young. You live the remaining days of August care-free, spending $10 here and $20 there. By return of school in September, you hardly know what happened to that $4,000. That’s precisely what happens to us with time. When every $1 represents 1 week of life - the weeks leave us as fast as the dollars do.

If you live at the 45th parallel North, like I do, that’s about 80 summers, 80 falls, 80 winters, and 80 springs. Eighty cycles of death, stillness, and rebirth. We don’t really tune in to what’s actually going on around us until we reach adulthood - all of a sudden 80 becomes 62. We don’t enter No Life until our mid-to-late 20s. 50 seasons. In the modern West, our truly healthy years are often fleeting - even though life-span is fairly constant. Let’s call it 45 vital seasons. Oof.

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“On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, ‘we will all be dead any minute.’” - Burkeman

Time passes and we think we’re following as it does, but we actually aren’t. Or maybe we can’t. We think the ancient world is very far away. It isn’t. The entirety of modern human culture has passed in the blink of an eye - made all the more clear when measured by how many single human lifetimes have passed.

• The golden age of Egyptian pharaohs? 35 lifetimes ago

• Jesus? 20 lifetimes ago

• The Renaissance? 7 lifetimes ago

• The reign of Henry VIII? 5 lifetimes ago

Fascinatingly, on Craig and Kevin’s walk-and-talk through Indonesia, one of their guides could trace her lineage almost as far into the past as the death of Jesus Christ.

“Sixteen generations, she says. That’s how far back we can trace.” - Craig Mod

One possible reason that our perception of time is so far removed from the reality of time, is that life is no longer lived in seasons. Ritual and rhythms have come and gone, having merged into one endless year of working, scrolling, watching, and sleeping. We’ve let go of daily rituals and monthly rhythms. The year, for many of us, feels the same from January to December. The Starbucks Frappuccino No-Foam Half-Sweet is as available in New England’s November as it is in Florida’s February - and this somehow makes time pass even faster. The tedious job we hurry and scurry to after having our named called at the venti counter.

“…and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.” - Maria Popova

David Foster Wallace would later note how the frantic toil of ambition is somehow the opposite of flow.

“It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.” - Foster Wallace

But so too is endless procrastination.

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.” - Seneca

And so what is the antidote? Seasons. Seasons are the antidote! Winter scallops, spring salmon, summer tomatoes, and fall pears.

“He was in a rush. He wanted to do everything quickly, urgently, even though he knew nothing. The Maestro slowed him down. ‘You can’t do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.” - Buford

This year, at the 45th parallel, winter scallop season has come and gone - but not before the bounty could be harvested.

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I have a special connection to the crew of Cal’s Commander. They come in through the breakwater (never having been all that far from shore) and tie up with the St. Martin’s covered bridge on starboard side. They sell their wares at a small retail location up the road - Spinney’s Seafood Market.

This year’s scallops were sublime. You’ll notice that scallops - if you’re a kitchen creature - caramelize butter like nothing else does. I don’t know the gastronomy here - whether there are naturally occurring sugars in the meat - but I know that butter forms in a sweet layer around the scallop, if cooked the way they ought to be cooked, so I don’t particularly care what’s doing the sweet layering. I’ve perfected almost nothing in life, but I’ve perfected winter scallops.

The last batch we cooked in a cast iron pan (well seasoned) on a wood stove (proper heat). It’s not easy to control heat in a wood stove. That makes the process much more enjoyable. It’s fleeting. It’s impossible to do perfectly. There is work to be done and waiting to be had. You have to make peace with that. It’s what the Japanese refer to as ichi-go ichi-e - once in a lifetime, never again.

Waiting is an essential element of seasonality - something that is as lost and obscure to most of us as timelessness is. We can hardly imagine what it would mean to only have access to certain things at specific times of year - to have the gumption to wait for those things and to realize that things are indeed worth waiting for.

Waiting for something is to sacrifice our satisfaction in the moment. The etymology of sacrifice is to make sacred. Is anything sacred anymore? Infinite products, on infinite shelves. Bourdain, in his restless wisdom, urged us to consider the waiting and the working.

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Food might indeed be the best place to start talking about time because the connection between our healthy years and the seasons is deeper than we know.

After countless hours down the podcast rabbit hole, it’s obvious to me now that our bodies and our subconscious minds are a kind of genius. They do what they’re meant to do, with hardly any input at all from our conscious (and often foolish) minds. This genius is the product of hundreds of thousands of years (we think). Our bodies have learned to adapt and thrive in specific environments based on light and temperature.

Essentially, our bodies are constantly sensing the outside world, taking in clues from the latter and the former. In this way, it knows what to do and how to be in the world. It can understand where it is in space, and when it is in time. If it’s low light and cold, perhaps an early January morning in upstate New York, the body works to generate more heat to warm itself up and asks us for more rest. In the tropical heat of summer, when the days are long, the body cools itself by sweating and even briefly sleeping (a siesta!) when the sun is highest in the sky. Energy abounds in the morning and evening because we have to make hay while the sun shines.

Light seems to be the real key here. We can think of food as a manifestation of light - it’s only possible through photosynthesis. Food is important to our seasonal well-being because food is light. How remarkable!

Think of it is this way - before modernity and globalization (not long ago), light and temperature dictated what was available to us as food and energy. For the Inuit of Northern Canada, the cold months meant feasting, almost entirely, on protein and fat from the land and sea, allowing them to build up brown fat and stay warm and healthy during the cold period. The bountiful DHEA in seafood, for example, happens to be precisely what the body needs to replace Vitamin D when we can’t make it naturally from the sun. Again - remarkable. In the months where the sun is strong, we get our plants, those plants fruit, and we enjoy the carbohydrates and sugars of the summer.

The cultural implications here are just as fascinating as the biological - again, a knowing that is very hard to describe in words. For the Inuit, again, while the sun shines and the days are long it is essentially taboo to sleep. There is work to be done and the world is telling you now is the time. Rest will come, the sun will go, and it will be time to recover. For now, it’s time to work.

In a world where global shipping and Costco exist, we can eat any food from anywhere on earth, on any day of the year. That’s true for almost the entire world at this point. In Boston in February, we start our day with an iced americano, or a cold smoothie after a fasted HIIT class before the sun has even risen. The result? We get cold hands, cold feet, sniffly noses, and auto-immunity. We’re telling our body it’s July and that our body should cool itself down, not heat itself up. We literally can’t generate our own heat because we’re sending mixed signals to a body that knows exactly what to do when given the tools to do it. Our mitochondria aren’t functioning the way they should.

When we honour the seasons, we quickly realize that we were perfectly designed to be in the environment we’re in. Our body and subconscious mind, without any doing or trying from us whatsoever, knows exactly what to do. Isn’t it logical then to conclude that whole human health is an allowing not a trying?

We deny endlessly - like a running grave - the fact that time passes us by faster than we can get a grip on it’s passing. Seasons come, and seasons go. We’ve clearly internalized this to some degree - albeit subconsciously - because most of us now spend our time attempting to preserve moments on our devices instead of enjoying them as they come.

“In his book ‘Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone…so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos of it on their phones. So intently were they focused on using their time for a future benefit…that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all.” - Burkeman

I’m as guilty of this as anyone - although if I were to give myself any credit at all, it would be in the trying to overcome this curious compulsion. My problem is this: when you have a craft, you’re always thinking of the craft. And so when great moments do arrive, my first instinct is the feeling and experience of the thing - trying to get a grip on it so I can write about it in the future. And hopefully the writing will attract community - like this one - so I can write and share more. And on and on it goes.

Perhaps that’s me doing exactly the same - missing real moments in favour of moments that will appear later on the page. Alas, writers, write. That’s what we do. We can hardly help ourselves. You are what you do, and little else.

“But, time — that’s the key. As our great guide Rustaman told us each morning at the end of our little pre-walk stretchy yoga sessions: Time is yours. The perfect distillation of life, the universe, everything.” - Craig Mod

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

Onward.

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“In four months, you learn the essentials of the place,” Batali told me. “If you want to learn them properly, you have to stay a year, to cook through the seasons. But I was in a hurry.” - Bill Buford

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See you on the path.