MaraTime: The Future of Time

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the eighth and final piece of the collection. Click here to read the other articles in the series.

Stress. Hurry. 

Anticipation. Dissatisfaction.

Reaction. Panic. Frustration.

Pause

Internalise. Imagine. Ignite.

Sense. Visualise. Collaborate. 

Listen. Recompose. Create.

Connect. Transform. Translate.

 

I am writing this from thirty-five thousand feet above the Earth, inside the troposphere—the lowest, most weathered layer of air—where light softens and continents seem to dissolve into one another, where almost all weather and life-supporting processes occur. 

The flight takes me from Ireland to India, crossing the Irish Sea, North Sea, the Aegean, the Caspian, the Levantine Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea: waters that have carried sailors, salt, stories, secrets and sorrow, for millennia. From up here, it is impossible to see borders, only the gleam of rivers spilling into deltas, the pale subtle texture of coastlines, and the bruised shimmer of cloud-shadow on ocean skin.

From this height, the planet looks whole—not damaged, undivided by political ideologies and connected by water. What we call continents are merely rocky interruptions in a single, breathing sea. The thin air beneath the plane’s wing reminds me how narrow the margin of habitability is: a few kilometres of atmosphere holds all weather, all tides, all breath, all human noise.

It’s easy, from here, to forget that the ocean is often spoken of as a barrier. From this distance, it is the connective tissue of the planet—a vast circulatory system pulsing through every latitude, linking the shores that the vocabulary of political divergence and resource obsession have taught us to see as separate. I feel tears run down my cheeks, salty like the sea—not so far below me, waves break on a coastline where people are dying—a genocide unfolding on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean on that ancient seam between desert and sea. Geology knows this place not through race or borders but as where the African and Arabian plates have pressed against the Eurasian for eons. 

I look down and think of Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”—his reminder that every war, every harvest, every love story has unfolded on this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” And perhaps that is where the future of time begins—in learning to see ourselves not as inhabitants of countries, but as visiting sailors in a shared, fluid body. The oceans have always carried reflection, refraction, movement, adaptation, decay, renewal, layers from the past and numerous possible futures.

From this window seat, time feels elastic. The distance between departure and arrival collapses into a smooth white arc across the sky. 

Below, the planet keeps its parallel clocks—tides swelling, salt crystallising, sea levels rising, mangroves inching upward through silt. 

Beyond, cosmic time warps and bends, pulls and holds, manifesting nebulas and giant explosions all while reframing the past, present and future across timelines that are impossible to fathom.

It strikes me that the future of time may depend on our willingness to hold these scales together: the speed of quantum technologies, the glacial patience of cosmic time and the human tempo in between. While a single action may seem insignificant, the cumulative tempo of these daily rhythms—how we eat, move, build, extract, and restore—collectively influences how the Earth system reacts: its climate, its biodiversity, its stability.

Each of the places, seas and shores I’ve written from holds their own tempo and lexicon for change. From Connemaragh to Komodo, from the Andaman mangroves to Iceland’s fjords, time is not a single, linear scale but a braided set of rhythms. There is the quick time of yanking a fishing net with the tide, the seasonal time of migrations and monsoons, the geological patience of reef skeletons turning to substrate. Those who have paid attention have learned to live between these tempos. They have learned that caring for systems requires listening to their slow cadences as much as to their abrupt collapses.

When viewed from above, these times overlap, and human calendars merge with the deeper, cyclical time of water, migrations, seasons and weather. Perhaps what we call the “future” is only the meeting point of these rhythms—not a line we travel along, but a tide that we rise and fall within.

In recent years, I’ve been drawn to the idea of the Symbiocene, a term environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined and offers as a counterpoint to the Anthropocene. It imagines a future in which humans no longer see themselves as the centre of history, but as one of many participants in a network of mutual thriving. The Symbiocene asks for a reorientation away from ownership toward participation, and from extracting resources toward reciprocal relationships. Progress is measured by the depth of our connections with the living world, not by speed or scale.

We have been walking with time along coasts for seven essays now, watching how tides fold into ways of knowing, how practice writes memory, how recipes and reflections record the taste of the past. Looking down at an expansive river delta, I think of how knowledge and care flow through generations, as do brutality and pain; like sediment settling, resettling, and shaping new land. If the past essays traced how time is practiced through ritual, craft, pedagogy and science, the future asks: how do we collectively make a world that values time in ways other than extraction, productivity, and speed? We might think of water as the Earth’s archive of memory, of wind carrying messages through time, and of ecosystems speaking in faded languages that we can re-learn.

What, then, is the future of time?

Perhaps a perception shift. To live into a Symbiocene is not to pretend harm did not happen, or erase structural power or responsibility; it is to foreground co-temporal life. It is an aspiration and a tool—a language to imagine different politics, different economies, different attentions. There are many other proposed names for this epoch—Jason Moore’s Capitalocene, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, or Plantationocene)—each highlighting different root causes and solutions. The task is not choosing the perfect word but building institutions, arts, and practices that change material relations. 

We must make room—linguistically and institutionally—for multi-tempo governance, for policies that recognise the criticality of times operating in any given place: spawning windows, monsoon-driven livelihoods, ritual calendars, carbon cycles, cultural festivals. Each rhythm holds knowledge; each requires different forms of patience. Words map ideas, and the words we choose for time—season, pulse, delay, regeneration—carry politics as much as poetry.

This is where epistemic partnership becomes essential: the bridging of ways of knowing through dialogue. Both Slow Looking and Two-Eyed Seeing, introduced in the first essay, have quietly threaded their way through all that followed. They remain, for me, the twin gestures of learning—attention and relation—through which perception deepens. They invite us to pair observation with empathy, measurement with memory. Together they offer a lens better suited to stewarding life across scales of time and place, one that holds the scientific and the sensory, the ancestral and the contemporary, in reciprocal focus.

Since people build timelines through their actions, what if we were to consider ecological literacy as civic skill? Just as we teach numeracy and literacy, we can cultivate chronoliteracy—skills to read tidal calendars, phenological signals, and socioecological rhythms—on piers and in classrooms, in community centers and markets, in forest canopies and city councils.

What if we start to design for the multispecies and the multi-timescale futures? Infrastructure and conservation should be reciprocal. Mangroves are both carbon stores and nurseries for marine communities. Salt pans are both labour economies and microhabitats. Can reef restorations match heat-tolerant genotypes to likely futures? Can fisheries closures once again be timed to spawning peaks? This is applied patience: engineering and leadership whose metric is resilience measured in seasons and generations.

The future of time will not be decreed by manifestos alone. It will be convened in small acts: a recipe passed from hand to hand, a child taught to read tide lines, a scientist who learns to stay in silence and listen, a policymaker who waits an extra season before declaring a “solution”. Each of these gestures—rooted in patience, in continuity—embodies time itself as knowledge in motion, handed forward through memory, land, ritual, and care.

So, what can we do—here, now?

Begin small. Learn one local calendar: the rhythm of your own place. Start with tide tables, breeding windows, or a list of firsts—the first bloom, the first returning bird, the first hint of a season turning. Ask a child to do this with you.

Keep one recipe of place. Cook it slowly. Share it. Learn the seasons and hands it depends on. Let it teach you what matters.

Use two eyes. Read science; listen to story. Invite both into your work and your living. Practice refraction—before passing swift ethical verdicts, let a moment travel through you, bend through other stories and times.

Look slowly. Notice detail. Wonder. Enquire. Remember. 

Reflection, after all, is not a still surface but a living act: the light we choose to hold, and the patience with which we allow it to change us. The future of time is a slow kind of imagination, demanding patience even as climate shifts demand urgency.