Machines

“Batteries are the most dramatic objects. Other things stop working, or they break, but batteries — they die. If you’re a battery, you’re either working or you’re dead.” -Demetri Martin

Many years ago, my wife was out for the evening, and our children were asleep in their rooms. I sat quietly on the couch deciding if I should spend the silent evening catching up on work or enjoying some undisturbed reading time. While I was making this decision the gurgling noise of the dishwasher, followed by the engine sounds of the washing machine, disrupted any hope for quiet. Initially irritated, I started to get up to find my headphones to combat the noise. But then I considered these chores being done on my behalf. Without these machines I wouldn’t have been considering reading or working but been scrubbing cloth and porcelain into the night.

It’s no secret we live, and have been living, in times where so much is automated for us. I wouldn’t consider myself old and yet many of the devices I use daily would have astounded my high school self (who one time waited outside a Best Buy the day after Thanksgiving in hopes of getting a 256MB mp3 player). The wonderment of technology is certainly commonplace, and to comment on it risks coming off as a luddite or sounding cliché. Even within the time I first began this piece and share it now the arrival of AI has further changed these reflections along with our lives. But that evening long ago, as I watched my irritation become curiosity, I began to look at these machines a little differently. So much so that I have not one, but three invitations that I look for when I’m caught in the middle of a cycle of laundry or waiting for a food order or during a long travel day.

I’m willing to risk being cliché to share these pauses over the next few months. I will confess that when I first started this piece 53 months ago, I attempted to merge all these ideas together. And 24 months ago, when I tried again, I still did not have the internal spaciousness to negotiate them all. They will differ from one another, but they will all echo some of the words I’ve written on time. Often time is mentioned as something gained, or lost, when all that really happens is it gets reallocated. Nobody, through their efficiency, gets awarded a 28-hour day or through their laziness is penalized with a 19-hour day. Rich or poor, we all get twenty-four. And it is these 1,440 minutes that demand, ask, invite, require, obligate, plan, rest, relax and excite us every day.

The issue for me, and something that I’ve been attempting to rescue in my days for years now, is the mechanical aspect to the passage of time. The format, numeric and even simply the appearance of the modern clock doesn’t help with this at all. I say that this is an issue because regardless of how normalized this is, there is a dissonance inside me that knows that the passage of time is a little more nuanced. Even as I now hear the tick on the grandfather clock in my living room, I know that the rhythm of time is not that static. As the drummer Jojo Mayer said, “there is a distance between zero and one.” And the myth of the machine is trying to hide that distance.