Time, silence and solitude

Lately, time has returned a lot as a matter for me. No wonder, it has appeared a lot here. Our relationship with time, what we make of it, How to stop it , how it looks The time in motherhood and so on. It seems that, even though I think about different issues, I arrive at the time. I have felt that, At the end of the day, we are always talking about time, time.

In its Last column , Julián Fuks wonders how to write without loneliness. In this beautiful text (like all the others of his), the writer remembers this image of the lonely writer, who places himself in a distant place so that he can write. And solitude is really that thing that has become so difficult to achieve, solitude not as abandonment, as Júlian himself says, but that of intimacy with oneself, of silence, of retreat.

When I write now, I find myself confusing silence and loneliness, feeling them almost synonymous. And this pair, which now seems indissoluble to me, joins time, the one that has been accompanying me and relaunching itself as a question, as a question. And then one arrives, which seems silly: after all, what is time?

This thing so abstract, impalpable, intangible, for which we create landmarks, divisions, that help to locate us. Some time ago, time was marked only by nature, by the position of the sun; then the church bell comes to divide it. We arrive at seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades... Time lives in clocks - before, hourglasses -, stopwatches, alarm clocks, attached to the wrist, on the bedside table, glued to the wall, but also ticking inside ourselves.

Sometimes, time gains corporeality, one can feel it behind one's back, pressing, rushing. Other times, time stops, suspended in the air, pausing life. So many times it seems little, insufficient, tiny, but it can also be boring, seeming dilated and even unnecessary. Time is everywhere and nowhere.

I now remember a tongue twister from childhood, pure popular wisdom:

Time asked time how much time time has, time told time that time has as much time as time has.

How long does time have? How much time do we have? Is time what we make of it? To feel time, perhaps we really need silence and solitude. To listen to one's own emptiness, to feel one's own time, to be with us and no one else, to escape from the noise or, to silence precisely to be able to hear it. Then, who knows, write...