Making Time for Idling

Diamond Kyle

Sep 26

7 min read

welcome to our

SATURDAY EVENING POST

September 26th, 2026

By Diamond Kyle

Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.

“Monochronic time is linear. Events are scheduled one at a time, with one event following another. [...] These cultures emphasize schedules, punctuality, and preciseness. They also emphasize ‘doing’ things. They are cultures that value productivity, that value getting things done ‘on time.’ They view time as something that can be lost, killed, or wasted—or, conversely, as something that can, or should, be managed and planned, and used efficiently. Polychronic time, by contrast, is characterized by several events happening simultaneously. [...] Time is less tangible, and emphasis is placed on the involvement of people and the completion of transactions rather than on schedules.”

— Giancarlo Duranti and Olvers Di Prata, “Everything is about time:

does it have the same meaning all over the world?”, 2009.

There is a peculiar cruelty in the idea of killing time. We say it while waiting for a train, sitting through an appointment, or passing an afternoon whose purpose has yet to be decided. The phrase makes an enemy of this beautiful thing. It assumes that time must either carry us toward something or be disposed of before something better begins. Yet many of the hours we remember most vividly were not spent as intended. A visit ran long because no one wanted to leave, a walk took an unfamiliar street, someone stopped on the steps after saying goodbye, and a conversation that had seemed finished found its true beginning.

Giancarlo Duranti and Olvers Di Prata write about time from the unlikely vantage point of project management. They distinguish an approach in which activities follow one another according to a schedule from one in which several concerns may claim attention at once, and relationships can take precedence over the hour allotted to them. They are interested in what happens when people with different expectations must work together. An interruption that seems rude to one colleague may feel necessary to another; a meeting that ends punctually may leave its most important matter untouched. Such disagreements are seldom recognised as disagreements about time. They appear as judgements about character: one person seems careless, another cold; one attentive, another inconsiderate.

We learn to read a clock before we learn what exactly is an hour and how much an hour can really contain. To arrive when promised can be an act of respect, but so can staying when a friend has begun to speak about something painful. These obligations cannot always be reconciled, because someone else may be waiting for us. The lives we share with others are full of such imperfect choices, and our ideas of a good use of time grow out of them. They are taught by families, institutions, work, faith, and the places in which we live. They change as our circumstances change. A person who once guarded every spare hour may become a parent, fall in love, care for someone ill, or find that a conversation is the only thing they have to offer.

Painting of a seated woman in a navy dress and hat beside a little girl in a white dress with blue sash, near a fence. — Édouard Manet, *The Railway*, 1873, oil on canvas, 93.3 × 111.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of Louisine W. Havemeyer.

Impressionist park scene with people rowing on a pond, white geese on grass, and lush green trees under a soft sky. — Berthe Morisot, *Girl in a Boat with Geese*, c. 1889, oil on canvas, 65.4 × 54.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.

Waiting can make us unusually aware of our surroundings. We notice a stranger’s expression, a movement beyond a fence, the slow change of shadows in the afternoon light. There are several ways of remaining somewhere, and our words for them expose our sympathies, bias, limitations. To linger is often to stay because we are reluctant to leave: at a table after dinner, before a painting, outside the home of someone we love. To loiter is to stay under suspicion, because someone else has deemed that our presence requires a reason. To while away an afternoon suggests a gentle surrender to its passing, though the phrase retains a trace of disapproval, as though pleasure without a result must be explained. The difference among these words is a matter of perspective, and sometimes of power. The same person may be welcomed to linger in a gallery and told to move along outside a shop. Before praising unhurried time, we might ask who can occupy it without being challenged.

The question becomes more intimate when another person depends on us. Much of care consists of returning to needs that cannot be met once and for all. Meals are prepared, bodies washed, rooms made clean, worries heard. These actions may fill a calendar, but their significance is seldom captured by the fact that they were completed. For years, a framed print of Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath hung in my childhood bedroom, and I always related it to the love of my mother, and I know now that it asks for attention to a commonplace act without making it an emblem of effortless devotion. Care requires patience, physical work, and the willingness to adjust oneself to another person.

Woman bathes a toddler in a basin, both looking down, in a softly painted room with floral wallpaper. — Mary Cassatt, *The Child’s Bath*, 1893, oil on canvas, 101.3 × 67.3 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Robert A. Waller Fund.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles enlarged the frame of that recognition of care when she spent months meeting New York sanitation workers for Touch Sanitation. In thanking them individually, she made the maintenance of a city a matter of human encounter as well as public service. Each person’s work was part of a vast, repeating system; each meeting took place only once.

Two sanitation workers talk beside a graffiti-covered white truck labeled sanitation on a city street. — Mierle Laderman Ukeles, *Touch Sanitation Performance*, 1979–80, citywide performance with New York City sanitation workers. Photograph by Robin Holland, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

It is easy to sentimentalise the time people give to others, particularly when it is given by people whose labour we have learned to expect. An act may be loving and exhausting at once. The person who cares may need someone to relieve them, like the person who cooks in a restaurant may want to be thanked and also to go home when the shift ends. A generous understanding of time must include the right to one’s own, it cannot ask some people to remain endlessly available so that others may enjoy an unhurried life or a very late evening.

Duranti and Di Prata’s discussion of culture grows more interesting when held alongside this question of obligation. Their account draws broad distinctions among regions of the world, though no individual lives according to a single temporal rule. We may be exacting about an appointment with a stranger and wonderfully indifferent to the hour in the company of family. We may come from a household where guests stay late, then work in an institution where every meeting ends on the minute. The authors advise against assuming that a cultural generalisation tells us what a particular person needs, and that advice opens a richer inquiry than any division of the world into two kinds of people. We can ask how habits of time are learned, when they offer comfort, and when they cause us to misread another person’s care.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled (free/still) invites people to eat and spend time together, making room for the unforeseen course of a conversation. In Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, the same table receives different forms of company and solitude. Around a table, people come to know one another over many evenings. A meal may be planned, but no host can determine in advance what it will mean to the people who gather to enjoy the meal. Perhaps the hope contained in hospitality is that everyone will feel free to stay.

Crowded indoor gathering with people chatting and serving soup at a table, orange backdrop and partial wall text in a bright hall.

Friends chat and eat near tall windows in a bright brick-walled room, with paper cups and a relaxed, social mood — Rirkrit Tiravanija, *untitled (free/still)*, 1992/1995/2007/2011–, refrigerator, table, chairs, wood, drywall, food and other materials, dimensions variable. MoMA PS1, New York, ©Ryan Muir.

Three women laugh around a dining table under a hanging lamp, with glasses and a small dish in a cozy black-and-white room. — Carrie Mae Weems, *Untitled (woman with friends)*, from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990, gelatin silver print mounted on board, image 68.9 × 69.1 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz. © Carrie Mae Weems.

Rest is a more vulnerable form of trust, when we close our eyes, we leave the waking world in the care of others. In Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers guests came to sleep in her bed while she documented their visits, making the act of resting and sleeping an unusual and vulnerable social arrangement. Sleep is never an empty space in the day, it has its own intimacies, exposures, and claims on the people nearby. Someone turns off a light, keeps their voice low, or waits until morning to have a discussion. The sleeper cannot acknowledge these small acts, though they may be among the very intimate ways love is built and a home is made.

Black-and-white photo of a sleeping man in bed, striped pillow and dark blanket, with handwritten caption along bottom. — Sophie Calle, *The Sleepers (Les dormeurs)*, 1979, gelatin silver print, overall 155.6 × 447 × 2.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Two people sit on a cream couch in a white room, one leaning asleep, in a loose painted scene with a red panel. — Noah Davis, *Untitled*, 2015, oil on canvas, 81.3 × 127 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honour of Jerry Speyer’s 80th birthday.

We often speak of time as though it came to us in divided portions and pieces, each hour or period replacing the last, yet the past accompanies us into even the briefest encounter. In Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Ike Ya, an embrace unfolds amid collaged images that draw other places and lives into the intimacy of the room. To spend time with someone is never simply to share the present hour, we meet with intentions and histories, with remembered homes, previous separations, private worries, and hopes we cannot yet verbalize. There are moments when another person’s company lets these many times coexist without demanding that we really justify and share them, or even sort them out.

Collage of a couple embracing on a couch in a photo-collage room, with a blue water jug, tableware, and patterned rug. — Njideka Akunyili Crosby, *Ike Ya*, 2016, acrylic, transfers, coloured pencil, and charcoal on paper, 211.5 × 233.4 cm. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

We rarely know, while an hour is passing, what place it will come to hold in a life. A conversation begun after a guest has risen to leave may be remembered for decades. A work of art that once left us unmoved may, on a later visit, seem to have been waiting for us. Such possibilities cannot be planned for, though we can make room for them. We can leave a door open a little longer, provide a place to sit, allow a conversation to find its own end. We can shape homes and public places with some faith in what we cannot foresee. The time we give to an encounter may bear its fullest meaning years later, in the life of someone we have yet to meet.