Reason for Living #4: Time is Beans (The Correct Version for Email)

guest essay by Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time

A NOTE: If you first saw this via email or on the Substack app earlier today, you, unfortunately, saw a version that had omitted (via my error) the first two paragraphs of Jenny’s beautiful essay. 🫣

This version is the correct one, which I am emailing to you again, and which I will share again on Substack Notes. Thank you for your patience, and my sincerest apologies to Jenny for the error.

Today’s guest essay for REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang is by Jenny Odell.

From Jenny: I am a writer and artist based in Oakland, California. My work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, researching trash, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In general, I am searching for frameworks that allow us to perceive something new about everyday reality.

My first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published in 2019, and my second book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, was published in 2023. You can see my other writing here.

My visual work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D'Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), and apexart (NY). I have been an artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, I taught digital art at Stanford University.

Thank you so very much to Jenny for being this edition’s guest essayist. 🩵

the brilliant Jenny Odell

In Saving Time, I wrote about an exchange I had with a friend in her 70s who lives in the mountains a few hours from Oakland. It was May 2021 and I was working on my book in her garden while she went about planting beans. These beans, she told me, were descendants from beans she’d bought from some forgotten place maybe 20 years ago; she’d given them to friends, and those friends had given them to still other friends. It was possible they’d spread across the entire country. Now, the only reason she had any to plant was that some of those friends had dried and saved some of their own, which they then gave to her. My friend knew that the book I was working on involved the history of how we came to see time as money, but also an attempt to see it as something else. Maybe beans were a better metaphor, we decided, since it wasn’t true that the friends had exactly given her back what she’d given them. Thus was born the inside joke that “time is beans.”

Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it, and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero sum game, and that sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some was to give it back to me. If time were not a commodity, then time — our time — would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world.

I’ve found myself returning to this experience again from a new angle. In March, I joined a volunteer group doing native plant restoration in the hills about half an hour from where I live. I was apprehensive, as I’ve spent my adult life in places I can’t garden, and had never so much as weeded before. The tool I was given was a foreign object, and I didn’t know how to read the grasses. But the elders of the group, of which there are many, were patient and un-begrudging toward me and any other newcomers, especially in matters where the only way to learn was to get it wrong. Every Sunday since then, I’ve gotten a little better at telling the brome from the needle grass, the melick from the rye. And I was surprised by the haptic pleasure of pulling up scattergrass and six-week fescue, the feeling of tiny fibers tearing, followed by a puff of soil to the nose.  

The bean story came back to me during a recent work day where the task was quite different from weeding: we were sorting seeds, all of which had been collected from the surrounding area. We made tiny paper envelopes for chia, madia, poppies, tidy tips, clarkia. Then the leader of the group, also in his 70s, so deftly demonstrated using the wind to separate the chaff from a plate of seeds that I immediately thought to myself that some knowledge is so embodied it could never be written down. It was the kind of admiration that's tinged with a bittersweet worry: what would happen if the knowledge disappeared with him?

This is just one example of a kind of age whiplash I experience in the volunteer group. I leave my apartment feeling old, with my accumulating health problems, gray hairs, early bedtime, and inability to drink more than one glass of wine. Then I get to the hill and I’m a student again, eyes and ears open not only for weeding tips but the kind of general wisdom that can only come from someone who's lived decades longer than me. The elders tell me how to pull up a mustard plant, but also about things that happened long before I was born. In a complete reversal from needing to seem like an expert, I feel the urge to drop everything just to absorb as much as possible. At the same time, I remember the exact moment when I realized — with an almost visible start — that one of the group’s younger members, a high school student, was looking to me for the same kind of guidance.

Am I old or young here? Giving or getting? This kind of thing can be hard to make sense of within a framework where time is standard and fungible, the 24 hours supposedly allotted to you and Beyonce alike. If time is uniform — all hours are man-hours, to be exploited for value — it’s also linear, a graph where aging deprecates your value as though you were a car. But if time is beans, it’s easier to understand my situation. The seeds on our plates were both young and old. It was surreal to handle them for the first time, after spending so many hours with the plants that they’d both come from and would generate. Some of these species had been here for many thousands of years. 

As we were sorting our tiny envelopes into bigger envelopes, one of the older women — who can always be counted on for corny jokes and riddles — asked, “How can you name three consecutive days without using any days of the week?” I was gleeful when I figured out the answer: “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” 

A few days after sorting the seeds, we planted them on the hillside. I thought of something an older therapist had told me many years ago about working for the local parks department. She’d planted a redwood tree, and now she passed it all the time when hiking in Redwood Regional. I remember being somewhat shocked by the idea of having that kind of relationship with something in the environment because I had never felt that way. I might be an appreciator of trees but was in no way a participant, much less an originator. Now, as I shepherded the seeds into the ground, attempting to shield them with my body from the day’s fog-laden wind, there was something like traction, as though I were grabbing onto some wheel of time larger than my own life.

Each of us, in our own way, eventually encounters the questions “What will my life have meant in the end?” and “What will survive me?” It’s in that context that I consider the redwood tree, or the chia, or the seeds that they’ll give up for the following year. I will have left some kind of impression on the hill. But more importantly, my own life has been impressed upon by these people who are not my biological family, who have entrusted me with the knowledge that — like any gift — tasks the receiver with carrying it forward. I cherish these ties just as much as I do the color of the poppies, so much that I sometimes feel like the group is rehabilitating a human social ecology as much as a plant and animal one. In a recent interview, Zadie Smith described the pull of something similar:

Even today ... I was just going to the shops in my neighborhood and I saw the father of an old school friend who is suddenly quite old and incapacitated — he’s been put in a wheelchair for the first time — being pushed down the street by another school friend, like the younger sister of a friend of mine. So the younger sister is about in her late 30s and this man is 80, and I just saw it and I thought, wow. These bonds — these are not two people who are good friends, but they’re people who lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives and she has come to his service. She’s not a relative. She’s not the daughter. And I looked at both these people and thought, this is the kind of bind I want with people.

The story of the beans comes back to me not only, or not even primarily, because of the similarity of the seeds to the beans. What comes back is the friend who was planting them, the friend who loves to remind me, often with gallows humor about mortality, that she’s twice my age. I remember her story about the time her horse, whom she still misses, mischievously ate a check for $100 out of someone’s back pocket. I remember the day she told me, apropos of nothing, that she’d never wanted children nor had any qualms about that, then went back to her gardening, seemingly unaware of the importance of this information to me. I remember when she gave me lettuce from her garden and told me to just put lemon, olive oil, and salt on it – now my favorite way to eat lettuce. Each of these little bits finds a home in me, and they have a habit of growing. Over and over, her yesterday shows up in my tomorrow.

10% of the proceeds from each REASONS FOR LIVING newsletter go to an organization of the guest essayist’s choice. Jenny Odell has chosen Justice Outside. Justice Outside’s programs provide both established and aspiring outdoor professionals with the skills necessary to transform the environmental field into a more equitable and culturally relevant sector. Donations support Justice Outside’s work to advance racial justice and equity in the outdoor and environmental movement. Please consider donating here.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays by me per month. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations. They also help me to pay the bills, as my chronic illness and disabilities prohibit me from working a standard job.

Beans
by Mary Oliver

They’re not like peaches or squash.
Plumpness isn’t for them. They like
being lean, as if for the narrow
path. The beans themselves sit qui-
etly inside their green pods. In-
stinctively one picks with care, 
never tearing down the fine vine,
never noticing their crisp bod-
ies, or feeling their willingness for
the pot, for the fire.

I have thought sometimes that
something—I can’t name it—
watches as I walk the rows, accept-
ing the gift of their lives to assist
mine.

I know what you think: this is fool-
ishness. They’re only vegetables.
Even the blossoms with which they
begin are small and pale, hardly sig-
nificant Our hands, or minds, our
feet hold more intelligence. With
this I have no quarrel. 

But, what about virtue?

Cloud Gate is a public sculpture by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor, that is the centerpiece of Grainger Plaza at Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed "The Bean" because of its shape.

Consider what Jenny has said in her guest essay here: time is beans. What is time to you, if not hours and seconds and minutes? Complete this sentence: “Time is _________.” Write down what it means to you in your journal; feel free to share it in the comments if you like!

If you’re a person who writes personal nonfiction and/or memoir—and if you live with limitations, whatever that means to you—you might very well be interested in The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, which is our online writing school for such writers.

We offer eleven classes, from pre-writing to writing to publication, in our basic curriculum and twelve guest lecturers from foremost nonfiction writers such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Suleika Jaouad, Leslie Jamison, Stephanie Foo, and Eula Biss, as well as community via our Coffee/Tea Chats, weekly co-writing sessions, and online forum. Seeking accountability? Our personalized accountability set-up and themed adventures might just be the thing for you. Finally, I’ll be answering your questions and reviewing your work (only if you want!) during our monthly group coaching calls. It’s a warm environment and a terrific all-in-one resource, particularly if you’ve been seeing loads of writing classes here and there and have no idea what to dive into. Learn more here: http://unexpectedshapeacademy.com/.