As a child, I used to gaze out of the car window, breathing in the intervals between each time I saw a street light blink past us on the motorway and not breathing out until another lamp came past again. Walking down the street, in and around the city, sometimes we forget to look up. Instead, we stare down at the concrete slabs beneath, searching for patterns in the various constellations of chewing gum stuck to them. One day, I thought about red cars and suddenly saw them everywhere. Though I hadn't seen a red car in months, they suddenly littered the street, throwing themselves in advertisements to me, coming up in conversation, or even taking a street name. I regarded their appearance as a sign from the universe, reinforcing that I was going the right way. The search for patterns is another way to make sense of or measure the world. It has been argued that such a venture is simply frequency illusion, the idea that once you become more aware of something’s existence, you, in turn, have a cognitive bias, facilitating its more frequent perception.

Our world is comprised of representations. Maps, clocks, spirit meters, callipers, or compasses, are all tools we use to quantify and organise the real. However, they do not truly measure reality; instead, they present a subjective version of it. They are what we have created to keep track and make sense of the world, but by being humanmade, they measure a biased version of experience. Even something as ordinary as time is not without its subjectivity. Time and its measurement since its inception have been a tool of the empire to build the systems and dominant structures of Western society.

One’s experience of both is never the same as another, so to assign a metric measurement to it is to neglect the phenomenological dimension of its experience. There are other ways we interact with the spaces and cities around us that do not quantify themselves metrically but rather with the emotional, spiritual or lived experience.

French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, known for his comprehension of everyday life, theorised the concept of Rhythmanalysis. Rhythm is not exclusively related to sound in this context but is more about how one perceives patterns or reads a landscape. Lefebvre noted that a Rhythmanalyst is “capable of listening to a house, a street, a town, as one listens to a symphony, an opera.” Walking through a field might feel shorter than walking the same distance down a crowded metropolitan avenue—the tone and cadence of both vary enormously. What has changed in these two instances is not the presence or lack of a clock in most cases, but rather the rhythm of the street itself, the footsteps walking down it, the cars passing by, the doors opening and closing or car horns sounding. Arguably, this extends to the architecture or lack thereof. In the city, you might count the streets you pass or use landmarks to gauge reality, whereas, in nature, you might be more inclined to the rolling hills that shrink at a slower rate.

Today, I caught myself clock-watching. It made the time encumber enormously. I remember when I began a job at a supermarket and was advised by a colleague not to bring watches onto the shop floor, or if I did, to at least have the courtesy not to inform them of the time. I’d search for irregular occurrences in ceiling tiles, products displaced from uniformity on the shelf, and try and tune out the radio, which, despite claiming to be a radio, played the same songs at the same hour each day. If I could make it through the day, resisting the urge to check the time, I would have succeeded. I’d tune into the irregular bleeps of the checkouts, intake the whiff of the strong cleaning products used early in the morning, fading as shoppers circulated in and out throughout the day, selecting their goods before rolling their spare change down spiral charity donation bins upon their exits.

A minute can feel like an hour, depending on where you are located, meaning that time is “both subjective and location-specific”. The pattern or rhythm analysis of the world is an embodied, true-to-life approach to measuring the spaces we inhabit and pass through daily. The rhythm or cadence of a location alters your perception and, therefore, experience of time within it.