The tape measure of time

The days have passed with no numbers.

Or maybe filled with them - 20,000 steps a day, 16 miles till the next viewpoint, get off the train in deux arrêts. The only measure of time passed being the number of unread notifications, the last time I called my parents, and the number of settings in which I’ve watched sports games.

I know time has passed. The holiday was long enough for me to empty every thought from my brain. I emptied my questions into the sea and sand and over noisy dinner tables while drinks were passed around instead of as a rant to a chatbot. No one talked to me about AI or a deadline. Then I came back. Work picked up, life drummed on, and my brain started wrestling new questions.

Much like everyone else at this point in the summer of 2026, I am sport-ed out and spending my time in movie theaters. I bought the AMC A-list, just so I could watch The Odyssey (twice - if I couldn’t get tickets for IMAX 70mm at Lincoln Center, you best believe I was going to watch it once in IMAX and once in 70mm. Not sure why, other than - why not? Wasn’t the whole point of this movie the technical feat? If you haven’t, read Emily Wilson’s review here.) And then there was Spiderman, One Night Only, and another Anne Hathaway movie to watch. (Watching movies in community is soooo back!!! <3)

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in a Greek mythology mania. As I’ve deep-cleaned my apartment, I’ve been listening to YouTube summaries of Zeus’ law, listening to an abridged Iliad, revisited CliffsNotes for details on The Odyssey, dug up my notes after reading Circe a few years ago.

The many different retellings of the same millennia-old stories remind me why I loved mythology growing up: stories were oral, and the person who told them to you changed everything about how you resonated with them. It was the same story, but a new piece of the puzzle to latch onto.

My current curiosity is: Chaos existed before everything else. Contrary to how the word is used now, Hesiod in the 8th century BCE describes “χάος”/ “khaos” as the emptiness from which life emerged, before order, or Zeus’ law. In an etymological essay, A.O. Scott describes chaos as “the emptiness that came before the beginning of time.”

A boundless stretch of time with no count didn’t sound negative. Then, when and why did the shift in the way we perceive chaos as a negative feeling come to be?

I turned to other ancient texts in a different culture: In the Rig Veda, the time before the universe began was described similarly. “There was neither death nor immortality then; no distinguishing sign of night nor of day.”

And then Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos: a raw, confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined, discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place.” Ovid wrote that in 8 AD. Somewhere between the abyss and the raw, confused mass, emptiness became a problem.

If you’ve been suspended in air, between two unknown time periods, how shapeless do you feel? What is the function of a form undefined? Is that why chaos is perceived as a disorganized mess? A consequence of how we view productivity and the hours of the day, amounting to an outcome?

But what if you have no measure of time other than experiences that push you from one point to the next?

In between my travels, I have suspended myself to my bed, confined myself to the couch, gone days without speaking to a human being, and barely eating until I eat everything in front of me. In that shapeless state of time, I am entering a void where I am denying my existence. And maybe that is the emptiness of chaos.

And now, in the present, I can’t remember the last time my brain didn’t think a thought. Where emptiness was as fleeting as the breeze in a Parisian heatwave. I was in the shower yesterday, and as I dunked my head under the tap, I thought about the turquoise waters that felt like a baptism. That emptiness didn’t feel like chaos. So why does this?

But then again — who is measuring the rate at which rocks on a French beach turn into sand? Nothing about it is disordered. It just has no numbers.