MaraTime: Time as Practice

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

Settle. Repeat. Rhythm.
Listen. Relearn. Embody.

From remote Scottish isles shaped by weather, to the field of tropical lagoons that form the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge, fisherfolk read swells, treetops, seabirds to know what sky will follow. Sea creatures synchronise spawning with lunar cues; ropes feel different after storms—salt-stiffened, knots swollen, their weight heavy with what they’ve held, their fibres worn where friction has rubbed them raw. Meanwhile, a consultant 800 kilometres inland builds coastal strategy from spreadsheets. The sea does not attend stakeholder meetings. It won’t be squeezed into a Gantt chart. It asks only: are you listening?

The fisher knows the tide by the smell of mud and seaweed exposed at dawn, the shell-gatherer by the rhythm of stepping, bending, listening. For ecologists, writers, photographers, wanderers, practice can be walking the same shoreline until the familiar reveals itself anew. Intuition, knowledge, and even mood, become shaped by this repetition, through ritual, labour, observation, and tending. From the Dhow to the Currach, boats are stitched from inherited ancestral knowledge as much as with rope, wood and hide. The designs of the flexible fish traps in southern Thailand and the lobster pots of Ireland are based on a temporal fluency accumulated over generations.

Early in my own practice in water, my attempts at half-underwater, half-air images were clumsy, the meniscus refusing to settle, the horizon buckling, and every frame blurred. With time, patience, and guidance I began to find that thin magic line where two worlds balance on a lens: sky above, reef below. Deliberate repetition hones knowledge, each return carves away uncertainty and sharpens attention. Over time, actions become intuitive, until a tide, a net, or a line of text feels almost like an extension of the body. 

The understandings shaped through practice may not get published in journals, but are embodied by communities and coastlines, living proof of how people and ecologies co-adapt over time.

I distinctly recall sitting beside Nelson, an elder of the Karen community, on the back of a dugout dunghi, his hand gently resting on the tiller as we made easy angular progress over swells off the coast of the Middle Andamans. He talked to me at length about how to read water, wind, and the stars. To him, navigation was about detecting the wind-shadows of islands falling across water, the feel of airstreams against the skin, the rhythm of waves beneath the hull, and an acute attunement to a world always moving.

This is the basis of coastal pedagogy: where you don’t fill a mind; you tune an instrument. Instead of reading a book in a room, you lead children through saltpans and let the salt gather under their fingernails, letting them feel the algae.

Practice is also the art of making dreams tangible. I learned that waiting for the “right moment” only leaves dreams suspended. To sail, you simply begin—with whatever vessel you have, however small—and with practice, you expand the horizon. And then there are the practices that often go unrecognised because they are seen as private habits rather than “knowledge-making”—the daily looking, sketching, jotting, noticing—that require more listening than doing, that slowly accumulate into knowledge. Each act carries forward into the next, enlarging the scale of what can be imagined and attempted.

The edge of the sea teaches neither urgency nor stillness. It is the kind of time you don’t measure. Only by dwelling in it do you slowly adjust. Waiting impatiently on a jetty in the South Ari Atoll of the Maldives, I asked how long the urgent delivery I was waiting for would take. The answer was simple: “It depends on the boat.” Here, like on many island homes, sea-states write the schedule. 

Knowing a place means returning to it again and again. This is not monotony, but intimacy. You begin to notice the winter silence when only gulls hold the bay, the spring floods when mudflats teem with migrant flocks, the summer swell when seagrass beds thicken, the autumn storms that reshape the shoreline. You learn where the crabs shelter, which hollow in the rocks holds freshwater after rain, how the air smells when plankton blooms. Ecologically, returning builds a kind of seasonal literacy—pattern recognition written through the senses. Spiritually, it is akin to prayer: you arrive not to consume novelty, but to be in conversation with a living presence, to notice how both you and the place have shifted since the last encounter. In this way, the place teaches you not only about itself, but the meaning of belonging through recurrence.

And so we ask: what if we took seriously the idea that time could be practiced, shaping our practice in return? If the way we learn, build, trade, conserve, and restore followed the pulse of place, not just profit and deadline? If restoration moved at the pace of microbes, tides, and coral polyps? What if education was no longer about catching up, but catching rhythm? Can we see repetition not as drudgery, but as attunement; not as inefficiency, but as intimacy?