Sighted people can bend time. For sighted people, time is sometimes slow, and sometimes rapid. They can make up for being lazy by rushing later on. Things can be gathered up quickly in a few minutes. … Time, for sighted people, is that against which they fight. For me, as a blind person, time is simply the medium of my activities. It is that inexorable context within which I do what must be done. … the reasons why I do not seem to be in a hurry as I go around the building is not that I have less to do than my colleagues, but I am simply unable to hurry. It takes me almost exactly twenty-two minutes to walk from my front door to my office. I cannot do it in fifteen minutes, and if I tried to take thirty minutes over it, I would probably get lost, because knowledge of the route depends, to some extent upon maintaining the same speed. … … [For the blind person] you are no longer fighting against the clock but against the task. You no longer think of the time it takes. You only think of what you have to do. It cannot be done any faster. Time, against which you previously fought, becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you act. For the deaf-blind person, space is confined to his body, but he has lots of time.
John Hull, Notes on Blindness (2017)
