Unlearning Urgency: What Tree Time Reveals About Living Differently
- Asvika Prakash
- Jun 20
- 5 min read
This piece was originally published in the May 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
And call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
Into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
With light, and to shine.”
- Mary Oliver
The pace of today’s world only seems to accelerate with the ever-increasing dependence on capitalism. There are moments in life when one just wants to be. To be in the present, to live in the moment and not to worry about the passage of time. Sometimes you wonder what it would feel like if you could live like that all your life. We carry so much weight in us, regretting the time we have lost and making up for all that time in the future. We are in a constant state of having to keep up with time.
Every Sunday, I spend hours on my terrace, staring at the trees in my neighbourhood. These trees exist in their own time. During the few hours I spend there, I lose track of time and the impending doom of deadlines and forgo the anxiety of “having to keep up.” My terrace gives me the comfort of existing in a liminal space. I’m neither inside my house, my private space, nor am I outside it, the public space. I’m in the space that exists between both, a liminal space that is suspended in time. I’d attribute this distortion of time to the trees around me.
Sumana Roy, in her book “How I Became a Tree,” introduced me to the concept of ‘Tree Time’. Trees are indifferent to time. They live, breathe, consume, work and exist in their own time. They set their own pace. One cannot plant a tree and expect it to grow within a stipulated period. The concept of ‘hurrying up’ is alien to trees. As Roy points out, they tend to be disobedient to ‘human time’.
Our lives are constantly measured by clocks and watches. Our brains and bodies are attuned to the ticking of these clocks. The notions of productivity and speed have become more than just a form of social conditioning; they have begun to shape and influence our biological functioning as well. Our eating and sleeping habits, even breathing habits, are now according to our strict schedules, which are aimed at maximising productivity and efficiency.
Critically, our bodies have become temporal constructs shaped by capitalistic requirements. In this vein, Bauman’s concept of ‘Liquid Modernity’ asserts that society under capitalism is in a constant state of change and instantaneousness, leading to the quickening of time and space. This eventually leads to a sense of anxiety in humans by creating a sense of slackness and an inability to keep up with larger social conditions.
Slowness is an alien concept, dismissed by capitalism as being inefficient and useless to progress. We often overlook how slowness connects us to the idea of simply being. By taking more time to observe the world around us—not wanting to constantly be updated about the news or negotiating our addiction to consuming bite-sized content that diminishes our ability to concentrate—and questioning the never-ending sense of urgency that makes our hearts palpitate, we unlearn the concept of time as devised by capitalist society.
What we learn from trees is that being still for a moment, slowing down, and embracing connectivity is an act of resistance and a radical alternative to the ideas of constant acceleration and linear progress. To be a tree is not stagnation, it is a way of connecting to the naturalness of time and reinvoking non-Western traditions of patience, cyclicality and being that contrast the industrial notions of machine time.
Salvador Dali’s works “The Persistence of Memory” or “Melting Clocks” focus on melting clocks hanging from trees, reflecting the rigidity of time and the need for it to be fluid. As an observer notes, “It is as if the series of instants, uninterrupted and eternal, changed its form with the modification of each instant that constitutes it, making it difficult for the series to discern the recording of each one of these smaller spaces of time itself.”
Roy’s text is thus a radical voice introducing us to indigenous and ecological ways of thinking about time. She writes, “What exactly is tree time then?... carpe diem, seize the moment, living in the present – that was tree time, a life without worries for the future or regret for the past. There’s sunlight: gulp, swallow, eat, there’s night: rest.” This might seem overwhelming for anyone who’s constantly anxious about keeping up with their schedule, or in other words, someone attuned to the capitalist way of life and its demands—but acting on this will alter our idea of existence to understand what it means to live a life of temporal resistance.
Now, without delving deeply into the sociological aspect of temporal resistance, we can maybe dwell on the idea of resisting the demands of time on us, by just being, much like a tree, like a Mary Oliver poem?
Edited by the Curated Editorial Team
Asvika (she/her) is a student of Political Science at OP Jindal Global University, and a Copyeditor at Political Pandora. Her research interests lie in anthropology, culture, grassroots politics and the intersection between literature and politics.
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References:
Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Penguin Books, 2017.
Roy, Sumana. “How I Became a Tree.” Yale University Press eBooks, 2021, https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300262681
Andreescu, F. Embodied subjects in late capitalism. Subjectivity 9, 145–150 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2016.6
Andrade FR, Antunes JLF. Time and memory in time series analysis. Epidemiol Serv Saude. 2023;32(1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10027044/
Keywords: Tree Time, Temporal Resistance, Slowness, Liminal Space, Capitalism, Productivity, Liquid Modernity, Mary Oliver, Sumana Roy, Non-linear Time, Stillness, Being, Machine Time, Ecological Thinking, Radical Alternative, Salvador Dali
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