Over the last few weeks, I’ve facilitated several sessions on wellbeing, rest, and collective care, especially in the context of the current political climate in the UK.

And I’ve noticed something. People are increasingly asking me to facilitate moments of centring. Grounding. Breathing. Pausing.

Tiny moments that allow people to arrive in their bodies again, and I’m noticing how people grab onto those moments, savour them … almost exhale into them.

The feedback afterwards is often overwhelmingly emotional. People speak about finally breathing properly, about feeling their shoulders drop, about remembering themselves for a moment.

And while I’m not a meditation teacher or a breathwork practitioner, and while I definitely don’t want my work reduced to “come in, do five minutes of breathing, then move on to the real work”, I completely understand what is happening there.

As a somatic practitioner, I understand the power of carving out time and creating space that almost interrupts time altogether. Moments where we stop being led by time, and begin relating to it differently. And that, especially when coupled with meaningful work before and afterwards, feels deeply important to me in our collective liberation movements. Because the truth is, many of us are exhausted in ways that go far beyond being busy.

And I’m feeling that personally, too.

I’m currently moving through one of those periods where everything seems to be waiting for me all at once. Repairing the garden fence. Filing taxes. Grocery shopping. Community celebrations. Family trips. Client relationships. Admin. Visioning. Planning. Cooking dinner.

It feels like time itself is constantly demanding more from me. More attention. More headspace. More decisions. Sometimes it feels like time is chasing my peace.

And the more I sit with this, the more I realise that our relationship to time is deeply shaped by power. We often talk about time as if it belongs equally to all of us. As if everyone moves through the world with the same access to spaciousness, rest, flexibility, recovery, and margin for error.

But that simply isn’t true.

Some people move through systems with margin. Others move through systems already out of breath.

Some people are allowed complexity. Others are expected to remain efficient.

And power quietly reveals itself through who gets time, whose time is protected, and whose time is endlessly extracted from them.

Because urgency culture is not neutral.

Urgency is often framed as professionalism, productivity, commitment, and leadership. But so often, urgency is actually a symptom of disconnection. From our bodies, from each other … from the pace human beings were never meant to sustain. And the burden of that urgency is not carried equally.

Time is classed. Gendered. Racialised.

There are people whose lateness is interpreted as importance, and others whose lateness is treated as irresponsibility. There are people who are allowed spaciousness, softness, recovery, and grace, while others are expected to absorb pressure silently and keep performing through exhaustion. There are people whose time is treated as valuable, and others whose time is treated as endlessly available.

The politics of time often reveal themselves through one sentence.

“We don’t have time.”

We don’t have time for a check-in.

We don’t have time to listen.

We don’t have time to reflect.

We don’t have time to involve people in the decision.

And whenever I hear that sentence, I find myself wondering.

Says who?

Who decided there isn’t enough time?

Was it a conscious decision? Or an inherited expectation? Is it genuinely your choice, or does it feel as though someone else owns your time and has already decided what matters?

I think answering those questions often puts things into perspective.

Because if we approached time the way a loving parent approaches preparing a meal for their children, many of these decisions would suddenly seem absurd.

Would they say, “We don’t have time to add salt”?

Would they say, “We don’t have time to boil the water”?

Would they cook dinner and then decide, “I don’t have time to feed both my children, so I’ll feed one today and the other another time”?

Of course not.

The things that are essential get protected. And yet in organisations, communities, and institutions, we routinely hear that there isn’t enough time for the very things that make people feel human.

One example comes up repeatedly in my coaching conversations around organisational culture and team cohesion. I’ll often ask team leaders whether they have regular team meetings.

The answer is usually an enthusiastic yes. Then I ask a second question: Do you begin those meetings with a check-in? Do people have the opportunity to say how they are, connect with one another, and arrive before moving into the agenda?

And more often than not, the answer is exactly what you’d expect.

“We don’t have time.”

Not enough time to connect.

Not enough time to listen.

Not enough time to acknowledge the people who are actually doing the work.

And that tells us something important.

The issue is rarely time itself.

The issue is what we have collectively and systematically decided matters enough to make time for. This is especially true for those carrying invisible labour. Care work. Emotional labour. Community work. The labour of holding things together, often without recognition.

And all of this shapes the nervous system, because living in constant urgency changes the body. It creates compression. Compression of thought, compression of breath, compression of attention, and worst of all, compression of imagination.

There is a particular violence to constantly feeling rushed. To never fully arrive anywhere because your mind is already being pulled towards the next demand. Urgency culture rewards disconnection from the body and calls it professionalism.

And over time, many of us internalise this pace so deeply that stillness itself starts to feel uncomfortable. Rest starts to feel unearned. Spaciousness starts to feel irresponsible.

I hear it in organisations and community spaces all the time.

“What activities can team members do to rest?”

And every time I hear that question, I pause.

Because what sits underneath it is often something much deeper.

We can no longer imagine simply resting.

We need to be doing something while we rest. Learning something. Making something. Producing something. Even our rest has to justify its existence and prove its value. It has to be productive, educational, creative, and purposeful. It has to earn its place.

We have become so conditioned by urgency and extraction that being still for even five minutes can feel uncomfortable. Unsettling.

And perhaps that tells us everything we need to know about the politics of time.

This is why I think so many people are responding so emotionally to moments of pause right now. Not because breathing exercises are revolutionary on their own, but because carving out a collective pause in a world organised around extraction is quietly radical.

As Tricia Hersey reminds us, “Rest is resistance.”

And I think that is often misunderstood. Rest is not just self-care packaged for consumption. It is not another thing to optimise, purchase, or perform aesthetically on social media.

There is a difference between rest as consumption and rest as reclamation.

Rest as consumption says, “Recover just enough to return to productivity.”

Rest as reclamation asks a much deeper question. What would it mean to reclaim our bodies, our time, our attention, and our humanity from systems that constantly demand more from us?

This is where the work of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Tricia Hersey, and so many Black feminist and liberation lineages feels important to honour. They understood long before many of us that rest, care, slowness, and spaciousness are deeply political.

Not because slowing down magically dismantles systems. But because reclaiming our relationship to time interrupts the logic of extraction, those systems depend on.

Collective pause matters because it allows us to hear ourselves again.

To remember that we are not machines.

To reconnect with our bodies before we reconnect with strategy.

To notice grief. Joy. Fatigue. Desire. Longing. Anger. Possibility.

And perhaps most importantly, to remember that our worth is not measured by how efficiently we abandon ourselves.

You know what one of my favourite moments is as a space holder and community organiser?

In Makani monthly spaces, we don’t have visible clocks or event agendas.

And in almost every gathering, at some point, someone suddenly exclaims, “Oh my God, what time is it?” followed quickly by, “What time do we have to leave?”

And our response is usually, “Don’t worry, we don’t really have time limits.”

Honestly, I think this is one of the biggest compliments we could ever receive as community conveners.

People losing track of time. People softening enough to stop monitoring themselves so tightly. To stop rushing. To stop anticipating the next demand for a moment.

That, to me, is time reclamation.

As facilitators, leaders, and people holding space in different ways, I think we need to pay more attention to the politics of time.

Who gets rushed?

Who gets flexibility?

Who gets recovery?

Who gets interrupted?

Who is expected to respond immediately?

And who gets to disappear for a while without consequence.

Because power moves through time in ways we rarely name.

And maybe part of collective liberation is not only changing how we organise power, but changing how we relate to time itself.

Not as something constantly chasing us. But as something we can consciously shape, protect, share, and reclaim together.

This is the fifth blog in my Power Awareness series.

More to come in June.

© Reem Assil 2026, All rights reserved

Photo by © Reem Assil 2026 
(I’m accompanying this month’s blog with a close-up photograph of one of the poppies in my garden.

Have you ever slowed down enough to look inside a poppy? Have you ever given yourself enough time to notice its intricate details?

Every delicate structure. Every fold. Every texture. Each part took life force to create. The process was never rushed. Never squeezed. Never cut short.

Nature understands something many of us have forgotten. Not everything meaningful emerges under pressure. Some things require spaciousness. Some things require stillness. Some things require time.)