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I received a text message yesterday afternoon from a friend waiting at a café. It said: "Hey, are you close?"
I immediately typed back: "Yes! About 15 minutes away."
It was a staggering, pathological lie. I was not fifteen minutes away. I was sitting on my living room sofa, wearing one sock. I did not know where my keys were. I had not yet brushed my hair. The café in question was three miles away, requiring a short walk, a specific bus that arrives only every 12 minutes, and another walk on the other side. To get there in fifteen minutes would require a military airlift.
Yet, as I hit send, I did not feel like a liar. I genuinely, deeply believed my own timeline. I stood up, moved with the frantic, uncoordinated speed of a startled pigeon, and sincerely expected to warp the very fabric of space and time simply because I had good intentions.
I was watching TV until my friend called, and I looked less like a silk cocoon and more like a discount tortilla.
Konrad Krzyżanowski, Painter's wife with a cat, 1912, Muzeum Śląska Opolskiego w Opolu
Henri Bergson and the Durée
Why do we suffer from this specific brand of spatial and temporal arrogance? Why do we constantly believe we can conquer geography in a quarter of an hour?
To understand this delusion, we have to look at the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson argued that human beings experience time in two completely different, conflicting ways: Clock Time and Duration (Durée).
Clock Time is objective, mathematical, and rigid. It is the time of physics, measured in unyielding seconds and minutes. Durée, however, is psychological time. It is fluid, subjective, and based entirely on our internal, lived experience.
There is no doubt but that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass […] and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself. It is memory, but not personal memory, external to what it retains, distinct from a past whose preservation it assures; it is a memory within change itself, a memory that prolongs the before into the after […] to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner life […] such is immediately perceived duration, without which we would have no idea of time.
When I sit on the sofa and text "15 minutes away," I am operating purely within the Durée. In my psychological imagination, the journey is frictionless. I simply teleport from my living room to the café chair. I completely edit out the objective, physical friction of reality: the time it takes to tie a shoelace, the reality of locking a door, the agony of waiting for a pedestrian crossing signal, the drag coefficient of a heavy winter coat.
I am a philosophical idealist at war with basic physics. I confuse my psychological desire to be there quickly with the brutal, mathematical reality of moving a solid mass through a crowded city.
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The Cat as the Master of Objective Time
While I am violently oscillating between the strict math of the clock and the sweaty delusion of the Durée, the cat possesses only one timeline. She does not have a psychological time and a physical time. In her mind, there is only one monolithic, unyielding clock, and it operates on a completely different existential plane than mine.
Her clock does not measure buses, social obligations, or "fifteen-minute" windows. It only measures her absolute, immediate biological priorities. For her, there is no such thing as "being late." There is only Now, and whatever Now strictly requires.
To her, my frantic rushing was not an emergency; it was just annoying, disorganised human background noise interrupting the only clock that actually matters. "I am scheduled to occupy this fabric of yours for another four minutes," her unblinking stare said while she was sitting on my coat on the sofa. "Your inability to grasp the concept of time is not an excuse to interrupt my reality. Wait."
She is the ultimate anchor of objective physics. She cannot be rushed, she cannot be hurried, and she will gladly let you miss your bus just to prove that her minute is the only minute that counts.
The Sweaty Arrival
The inevitable consequence of the "15-minute" lie is the sweaty arrival.
I arrived at the café exactly 34 minutes after I sent the text. I burst through the door, my winter coat feeling like a portable sauna covered in cat fur, my hair windblown, gasping a breathless string of apologies about "just missing the bus."
As I sat down, finally catching my breath, I realised that genuine modern kindness is not about being optimistic. Optimism is what leads to sweating. True kindness is accepting the crushing weight of objective reality.
The next time a friend texts me to ask how far away I am, I will set aside my Bergsonian fantasies. I will check the map, work out the distance, and give the harsh, honest truth.
"I am putting on my shoes. I will be there in 45 minutes."
It will feel harsh. It will feel unenthusiastic. But it is the only way to arrive with a dry forehead.
See you next time. Keep looking at the clock,
Asena
RABBIT HOLE
Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.
I read this article on the "uneasy history" of medicine and miracles. It reveals how modern psychiatry finds itself in a centuries-old stand-off against "psychic surgeons".
One example is Zé Arigó, a Brazilian peasant who skipped medical school in favour of being possessed by the ghost of Dr Adolph Fritz, who is a bald, deceased German who apparently preferred performing surgery with butcher knives and rusty garden shears rather than anything sterile.
Arigó’s record included curing blindness by shoving a blade behind an eyeball and removing kidney stones without anaesthesia, which naturally led to the "Arigó wars", a legal cycle where he was alternately arrested for "charlatanism" and graciously pardoned by the President.
This scene captures that enchanting moment of the 1640s when "medical care' was practised. Our surgeon here is dealing with a foot problem with a focus that suggests he has no understanding of nerve endings, but is completely convinced that more digging with a blunt instrument is the way to cure it.
The Foot Operation, Pieter Quast, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
The article explores why science sometimes cannot explain why your heart fails or why your baby is unwell, and why many people find the touch of a healer more believable, warm, and reassuring than a CT scan, even if that healing touch is guided by a German ghost in a surgical apron.
Back in the 15th century, if you were acting a bit too quirky, losing your temper, or just weren't the sharpest tool in the shed, people didn't blame your personality; they blamed a physical rock stuck inside your head. It was called “stone of folly”. The theory was that "madness" or "stupidity" was a literal stone or bulb pressing against your brain, and the only way to get your act together was to have a doctor go in there and fish it out.
To "cure" you, a wandering surgeon who was essentially a glorified street magician with a sharp knife would perform a public operation in the middle of town. While you were distracted by the excruciating pain of a forehead incision (and no anaesthesia), the doctor would use a bit of sleight of hand to "discover" a pebble he’d hidden in his sleeve.
He’d wave the bloody rock in the air, the crowd would cheer, and you’d be sent home with a hole in your head and a lighter wallet.
I have no idea why the woman has a book on her head, but judging by the rest of the scene, I’m starting to think nobody in this painting has a clue what they’re doing.
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, Hieronymus Bosch, The Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Çatalhöyük City Mural or Leopard Skin, Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Türkiye
This 8,000-year-old mural from Çatalhöyük (in modern-day Türkiye) is essentially the world’s first recorded architectural "Whoopsie." Widely considered the oldest map in history, it shows a bird's-eye view of a neighbourhood so densely packed that residents literally had to parkour across their neighbours' roofs just to get home since streets hadn't been invented yet.
The "scenic" backdrop features the twin peaks of the Hasan Mountain volcano mid-eruption, suggesting that the local real estate market was literally "on fire" back in 6600 BC. However, the site is full of mysteries; some sceptics argue the "volcano" might actually be a leopard skin, a common motif in the settlement's art, and the "houses" could simply be an abstract geometric pattern.
That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is this nonsensical meeting between 23rd-century technology and day-one biology.
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