For all its frenetic activity, the city can slow time in pockets. Researchers Kazuma Shimokawa and Eriko Sugimori at Waseda University found that people judged short intervals of time to be longer when viewing Shibuya Crossing rather than a rural landscape. In a second experiment, they compared crowded and uncrowded scenes of Ikebukuro Station, finding that crowds seemed to stretch time further¹. Consider a brief delay on a congested subway platform: the train is late, bodies jostle, and the platform overfills. We might wish the minutes away.
The cumulative effect of a life spent in a metropolis tends to be the opposite, though. Weeks disappear, months fly by, and we wonder where the time went. Individual moments can seem interminable, yet when we look back over a busy period, time appears to have passed remarkably quickly.
It has been one of those weeks in London. I had planned to publish a specific piece, but some stories take longer to find the spine of. At a moment when creators are incentivised to produce more, faster, and with less thought, one thing we can do to resist that pressure is not push out rushed work for the sake of supplying content. There's enough of that out there.
When responsibilities pile up and the days begin to merge, I have a few ways of recovering my equilibrium. They don't necessarily involve escaping the forward motion of city life. Often, it's a matter of finding another sort of time within it. I've written about several of these practices before, and this week I return to those earlier reflections.
In the Kitchen
When everything seems to need my attention at once, I often return to the kitchen in search of order.
Arriving home at night, exhausted, cooking from scratch is often one of the first things to go. There are faster ways to feed ourselves, and we can easily convince ourselves to use them. But I find that the more overwhelmed I am, the more valuable kitchen work becomes.
Preparing ingredients, cooking a meal and cleaning up afterwards form a contained sequence of physical tasks. Working through them offers a way to withdraw from the competing demands of the week and concentrate on what is in front of us. By the time the last surface is wiped clean, some of the disorder in the mind has often reorganised itself, too.
I explored this through Tenzo Kyōkun, Dōgen's instructions for the monastery cook. The 13th-century Zen master's teachings concern the importance of bringing one's full attention to ordinary tasks. For me, washing rice offered a particularly useful reminder. When my mind wanders, a grain or two invariably escapes down the sink, prompting me to return my attention to the task.
Cooking takes time, but in preparing a simple meal, I tend to feel I've regained more than I've spent.
At the Counter
I recently saw a chart in a gyūdon shop setting a target of 100 seconds to prepare eat-in orders. The pace at this old sugi counter, though, moves twelve times slower.
Our metropolises are adept at feeding people quickly, through automated ordering, standardised preparation and repeatable processes. But elsewhere, lunch can proceed at a very different pace.
At a small, long-established kappo restaurant in Ningyochō, I waited twenty minutes for a grilled mackerel set meal. Six customers sat alongside me in silence at the wooden counter, while a mother and son worked wordlessly between the kitchen and dining room. The only sound came from the faint crackle of AM radio.
The wait was restorative. Without taking out my phone, I found myself gradually processing the events of a busy morning. Devouring lunch at a chain restaurant, with noisy chatter bouncing off its glass and plastic surfaces, would not have afforded the same opportunity.
Old restaurants, coffee shops and other neighbourhood haunts often retain service patterns established before the contemporary obsession with efficiency. Entering them is a chance to inhabit another generation's pace for a while. Tokyo is rich in such places, but most cities have their equivalents worth seeking out.
[The Silent Lunch →]
Between Stations
Occasionally, I might feel compelled by the sheer urban intensity of a walk beneath the Shuto Expressway, Tokyo's vast network of elevated toll roads. Such a journey on foot carries a pensive undertone.
When travelling across a city, I often choose to walk part of a journey that could be completed more quickly by public transport. A station or two further before boarding the train home, say. Other times, I might walk the entire distance between appointments, even if it takes longer. Time spent on foot rarely feels wasted.
On one such journey, walking from Roppongi towards Shirokane between meetings, I came across a tiny park beside the Shuto Expressway. Occupying just 98 m², it contained a single keyaki tree, a bench, a few seats and an exercise station. Against the enormous concrete structure looming beside it, the park seemed almost absurdly small.
What began as a passing curiosity drew me into a closer examination of the space. I became so absorbed that I arrived late for my meeting. Later, that small park would lead me into an investigation of Tokyo's urban history, its scarcity of public land and the ingenuity with which small spaces are put to use.
The walk had taken longer than necessary, and my stop had delayed me further. But beside a roaring expressway, I had prioritised curiosity over the demands of the calendar. I don't remember what those two meetings were about, but I can still visualise sitting under that keyaki.
None of this will give us more hours in the day. Nor do I think we should aspire to move slowly through everything we do. The energy and momentum of metropolitan life are among the reasons I love cities in the first place. But when the weeks begin to disappear into one another, it helps to recover some control over how we experience them.
Until we meet in time, in space,
AJ
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