Today I learnt that in the Middle Ages a moment was a unit of time that was actually measurable! It was related to the movement of the shadow on a sundial, so its real length cannot be easily converted into our time format, but it must have been about 90 seconds on average.

I was quite interested to learn this because I use the term moment a lot in my everyday life, although I don't think I've ever really thought about what it actually stands for.

For me, the most common use case of a moment is usually a request for a slice of time that allows me to finish, what I’m doing and start something new. This includes bringing a conversation (verbal or written) to a graceful conclusion, and persisting any current state in a way that gives me a chance to pick it up it whenever I need to.

And so this is what a moment looks like to me: it lasts about five minutes and is a transitional period between two contexts.

What my moment does not contain is any kind of reflection. Neither about the ending context nor about the one that is coming. To add this to the transition would require another one of my moments (i.e. another 5 minutes). This would allow me to come out on the other side with a clear state of mind and enough mental capacity to be ready for a new challenge.

Unfortunately, I often don't do this properly and so I find myself in a new context with half of my background capacity still occupied with the last one. Needless to say, that this is not only unsatisfactory for me, but also frustrating for those around me.

Thinking about all of this, one more thing occurs to me: A moment (or two, to be precise) may allow me to transition from one subject to another, but it doesn’t involve any real change of state.

Anger, frustration, excitement, happiness... – whatever general state I was in, will be carried with me into the next situation. And this goes on until I manage to take the time for a 20-minute transition that allows me to really reset and be open to something new.

Whether it's a meditation or – depending on my energy level – just a quick nap, those 20 minutes work magic for me! If I've just had a challenging conversation and come out of it feeling frustrated and exhausted, a 20-minute transition is what it takes to stop feeling that way. And that is an absolutely worthwhile investment for all the things that are important to me. I can feel my mental muscles relax and I am finally able to empathise again – no matter what has happened before.

So, the understanding of what a moment was for people in the Middle Ages is obviously not enough for me. But learning that a moment was once a measurable unit of time has helped me to think about transitive states that you want to handle with care so that not just your physical shell but your whole person come out the other end. At the end of the day, setting clear boundaries between situations prevents misunderstandings and confusion from happening, because how on earth can your counterpart know that your rough replies come from a completely different conversation you had with someone else in a completely different context?