Loose time scales

I popped the wheel of the family e-bike by accident. It’s not the first time. This time we’re blocking the entrance of a public place. The kids are heating up in the trailer. The wife is not happy. I shouldn’t have lifted the bike and rushed the exit. Now the job is simple: stay calm, put the wheel back. She asks four questions in two minutes. The last one is the killer: How long will it take?

Technically it’s nothing. But it’s finicky. And the context is working against me. It’s hot. We’re tired. People need to get through. But I owe an answer: 5min.

Today I’m lucky, in under 3min the wheel, axle and hitch are back in tight. Estimates are always a gamble. I’m not especially good at it, and rarely lucky. I live on loose time scales. At work, a project is either going to “take a while” or “be quick.” A decade of startup life probably did that. I did not so great at GitHub (emotionally), where timelines were sharper.

As for family and personal logistics, time allocation and estimate vary according to interest. If I don’t like it, it takes too long or will take a subjectively long time. As a parent I throw around casually “give me a second” countless times a days. It basically means “wait”.

My use of temporal qualifiers on this blog doesn’t help my case. Time feels more abstract than ever. In exchange, I’ve been developing a newer sense of rhythm. Something closer to the body, to the circadian loop, to the way energy rises and falls without consulting a clock. Rhythm produces an intuitive scale. It’s elastic, situational, humane.

Perhaps, as often, I’m just blathering about word choice. My odd framework still maps roughly to the official system. “A while” is up to an hour and a half. “A moment” lands somewhere around five or ten minutes. “A second” is reliably two to five.

My father once told me about a road trip in Canada. When he asked for directions, people answered in time. “Yeah, Gaspé is far. Five, six hours.” Distance alone doesn’t mean much there. Weather, familiarity, traffic, time of day… many factors influence the answer. We’ve grown used to digital tools that provide reliable precision. That’s just not the reality of life.

Some people, my wife among them, like to play the numbers game. I don’t. But I understand the appeal. I have a bit of that Canadian looseness. I hear Aussies and island people have it too.