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Working in liminal timeframes
nine stories in thirty days of being on the road
The advantage of traveling is that it implies a seemingly endless number of timeframes left “available.” Some of these are quite unpredictable. Others are neatly constrained and delineated. What all of them have in common is their being endowed with a certain pseudo-leisurely quality. There is time to work, and then there isn’t. Think of waiting time at an airport gate — which irrevocably ends when the airliner staff calls for boarding. You can’t know when exactly it is going to happen, but you do know it’s coming. Or the wait on a platform, for a much-delayed train. It ends, but you do not quite know when it will.
Another shape of liminal time is the time of transportation itself. More certainty — yet, less comfort. A flight or a train ride only takes as long as it does.
I have always loved working in liminal time. It has a blend of quite ungraspable qualities. That half-baked feeling of imminent urgency. The sweet fragrance of a quickly opened laptop. The lingering fear that the cardboard cup of lukewarm coffee is about to tip over on one’s keyboard. The rude physicality of tummy aches, reminiscent of the last half hour before an important test at school — or the sensations of anxiety when one is about to leave for the airport and one slams shut the door of one’s home because the taxi has…
