How To Dilate Time
Thoughts on waiting
At the VA Hospital after hours, I follow Dad down the hallway toward an empty exam room. While he sets up the refractor, I try on pairs of sunglasses with insect lenses, meant to fit over another pair. I don’t like seeing through a layer of glass between my face and the room, and I’ve been begging for contact lenses. Dad clicks the remote and a string of letters appears on screen. I try my best to make a story out of them.
In another life, Dad would have been an architect, he says. In the exam room, I can see it in the precision of his fingers clicking the machine strength back and forth. I ask Dad The Architect about the rows of empty chairs that line each half-lit hallway in this hospital. He tells me that they didn’t build any waiting rooms here. A logistical nightmare of a mistake. A divine reminder: make room for waiting, or it will narrow you like plaque.
I’ve been working on waiting. Relaxing, as I contend with my first gray hairs appearing like sentinels on my head. Staring through the glass of my phone screen, I’ve discovered I can slip out of my skin. I can transmute myself into a form diffuse enough to travel ghost-like across the internet in search of sense or truth. It’s a pleasing feeling, sometimes, to leave the weight of my body behind, a problem for a later version of myself to contend with. I’m not sure what truth will look like when I find it at the bottom of my scrolling dreams.
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Beyond election day next week, the plodding pace of continued political organizing and necessary pressure looms. My brain and body can only accommodate so much incongruence before a state of overwhelm takes over. Such a disembodied navigation of my present leaves me ill-prepared to engage with the real people and geographies of my immediate being. Impatient and inattentive, I have trouble parsing the lessons my body teaches me about my connectedness to a world alive with examples of emergent strategies of change.
Earlier this month, I found myself talking about corn with my East Coast friends. They humored me. Drying husks scraped against the Midwestern horizon, and I described how they’ve always appeared as patient people to me, plant-arms outstretched, anticipating. What do they do after harvest? The work of growing is over, but there is so much year left yet. Browning stalks stretched steadfast in both directions. We sheared past in the car, en route to somewhere else. Fall waits for winter. The seasons bleed together and dilate.
Integral to many environmental and biological change paradigms is a reverence for the longform, cyclical alternation of mundanity and interruption—the interplay of chronos and kairos, as Jenny Odell ponders. Of vital importance within these cycles, though, is the act of befriending the waiting that has to happen for these longform processes to spiral into fruition.
Adopting a more expansive time-scale in my own life invites me to grow comfortable with decay in service of future growth. It doesn’t negate the immediate reality of destruction I witness and participate in or the need to channel resources toward present mutual aid efforts. But in the midst of this juggling act of short- and long-term priorities, I’ve been wondering about my own relationship with waiting in a more active, interconnected way.
As I navigate my mid-twenties, another election season, and the aging and deaths of loved ones near and far, I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. All of the shoes. So many shoes that I lose track of which feet are mine.
To counter this disembodiment, I find solace and momentum through a redefinition of waiting as an active, generative, and expansive process. What if waiting could serve a constructive function in my efforts to craft a life of meaning? It could be much more than just an inevitable, static, and resigned part of my forward slog. Learning from the time-weathered cycles of the seasons and my own body, I’m considering the word dilation as a powerful political and relational practice that allows me to balance patience with urgency on the brink of change.
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Fifteen years ago, a covered smoking shelter greeted us at the entrance to this hospital. Nurses and burned-out techs took drags under the curved roof, breaking up their days into chunks. I imagine the hazy brand of friendship that formed among these smokers with a wry kind of reverence. Their cigarettes and scrubs a symbol of unification—a contentment with the crushing closeness of living and dying and the unspoken reality that we are forever at the mercy of both.
They’ve turned that room into part of the Oncology Wing now. It’s an understandable, if ironic, decision to bring the hospital up to speed with its responsibility as a modern public health institution. But the logic of it burns as I swallow, and I miss the smoking shelter like I miss the gentle hypocrisy of childhood.
My phone buzzes with an election campaign text. Tired of Trump? Our future is up to you! I try to stare down the disjunction of language and reality, but it’s too big for my field of vision. The sun flashes straight at me, reflecting off the mirror of windows separating me from the tar-filled lungs on the other side, waiting for the next mutation.
Later on, Mom says she can imagine me falling in love with a military man. Something about their strong sense of devotion, however misguided. In the car, we pass a pro-Palestine rally as we curve the roundabout, and we honk, Mom saying yes, yes to herself. I almost miss the exit, forgetting I’m the one in charge of holding the mental map; I can’t get used to driving my parents around. My age is a number on a loose dial, slipping back and forth as I try to lock it into focus.
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What story am I telling myself about voting in 2024? It’s a choice that feels far from constructive: a lose or really lose version of choice that confounds my desire for nuance. A contradictory former prosecutor complicit in US-funded genocide or a white supremacist felon. In a week, the so-called United States will compile the results of millions of penned-in circles that will crystallize into consequences as embodied and violent as imperiled abortion rights under Trump or the continued Harris-backed collusion of weapons aid. I visualize each pen-holding voter’s hand scribbling into the empty space of each ballot “o.” It is a physical action at once emphatic and infuriatingly simple.
As I put my own pen to paper, I’m struck by how long it takes me to actually fill in the circle. To shade the box and contradict the empty space so completely as to leave no room for misunderstanding, machine error. It is a massive undertaking. I don’t say this with the same intrinsic trust in the democratic voting process that I hear certain older liberal voters voice with shoulder shrugs and an insistence on individual responsibility. Rather, I call this particular action weighty for the way it reframes my idea of time—of waiting—in this particular moment as an under-explored practice of metabolizing change.
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I read about relaxation. I’ve been learning about the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s all about expansion, it turns out. I dilate from my pupils to my gut.
As my blood pressure lowers, the walls of my veins widen, adding a lane to the universal highway snaking through me. As I slow down, my blood traffic eases up. I brake, and my body opens up another ramp. This contradiction strikes me as fitting: slow down to speed up? An inverted biological truth to match the distortion of time-space that spirals out from my phone screen—the portal that insists that, no, I am not mistaken, it is the children who are dying first, from pager bombs on the other side of Earth. The Earth that is still soggy from the floods a day’s drive south.
I breathe in and feel the caverns of my lungs echo; each time I think I’m getting old enough to understand, it gets harder to be sure.
A paramedic told me this summer that he’s been on the clock for half a dozen people in labor on the side of highways. Plenty of medics never encounter a birth on the job, but he’s been lucky enough to deal with more deliveries than most people witness in their lifetimes. Some of those calls didn’t go so smoothly. This is the difficult reality of being a veil-lifter. Marching into the house of death and dying, he mediates dilation in both its literal and time-bending manifestations. On a different day, that same paramedic insisted, cracking open a Diet Coke, that his goal is not to save. Just to keep people company while their world has broken open.
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Dad locks the door behind us on the way out of the hospital. I catch a glimpse of his ID badge, which shows a younger face. We pass the smoking shelter-turned-cancer wing and accompany our slanted shadows to the parking lot. I’m leaving soon, after this hometown intermission. I carry my new contact lens prescription with me, hand-written on a Post-It. I’m resolute and armed with a written declaration of promised vision. My pupils are dilated to let in the light. We’ll see.
Sitting in the passenger seat, I wonder: How can I become an architect of acceleration? I need to know, because my world has become w o r l d—I roll down the windows and the wind beats high-speed space between my words, distorting—and I am having trouble catching up.
Waiting, I remember, is the choice that remains. To slow, expand, and sink my body. I fight the sideways pull of digital fingers that threaten me with a groggy internet dreamstate, obscuring and resisting the specificity I see in Mom singing, yes, yes in time with the protestors. Can I learn to enjoy waiting, take a drag, drive slow toward old age, stalky, steadfast?
Dad has pulled into the driveway and is already on his way inside, preparing his notes for tomorrow morning’s appointments. I imagine his day will start like this: he will gently tip the patient’s head back. He will squeeze drops of fluid into both of their eyes. Blink, he will instruct. Then, he will wait for dilation.