On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.

It seems that way, if you let it. All too easily we overlook the role that our attitude towards time plays in how life unfolds. But raise our awareness and with minute changes we can transform our outlook. And it is worth it.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil drags Dante up the mountain to Paradise, away from the terrible waiting room of Purgatory, as fast as he can: ‘He who best discerns the worth of time is most distressed whenever time is lost.’ Those who best discern time’s worth are generally those who have brushed the crust of mortality – the survivors, the bereaved, those staring down the barrel of a terminal diagnosis. Like my parents’ friend, Henrietta, who described the gift she had received, after safely emerging from a life-threatening illness. ‘My husband and I became acutely aware how little time there is. There is no point deferring. When we wanted to do something, we just did it. It was the best time in our marriage.’ Their joy lasted two years, until his sudden death. His final words to her were, ‘That was a really lovely day.’ I would like them to be mine.

Years of my life have been cramped by the inhibiting belief that I did not have enough time. Writing this book reminded me that we can all take greater pleasure from what we have. Why wait until its sands are low? ‘In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives,’ wrote Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön. It is never too late to seek this sense of abundance.

Now is the time of your life. What might happen if you spent your day only on what was necessary or delightful to take you where you want to go? Millions have been inspired by Marie Kondo’s advice to tidy up, and to ditch possessions that do not serve a purpose or spark joy. How much more might we gain from decluttering time?

Imagine a day in which you accomplish everything that you intend, as well as coping with all the unanticipated demands, without getting thrown off track. A day in which you feel one step ahead, not constantly behind, trapped in a reactive cycle that seems to drag you backwards. A day of hours that feel satisfying, not cramped. A day in which the minutes for dull tasks dash by while hours for pleasure meander. A day that exploits the give in time’s elastic, giving you more time off. A day of miracles?

Not a bit. Your definition of time rich might mean working more effectively, or elegantly doing less. Whatever your goal, if you cease to feel like time’s slave then everything improves.

The mistake of rushing is to imagine that your time is not your own. The solution is to live in your own good time, at a pace that suits you. So quit chasing white rabbits. Stop stockpiling self-reproach. Set aside a few minutes, perhaps a few hours, to ignore the clock, and rediscover what time has always been, since the first hominid tracked the day’s passage by the slant of his shadow in the sun: your servant.

THE TIME TEST (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Here is a question. Give yourself three seconds to answer. Do not scratch your head, worrying about getting it wrong. There is no wrong answer. You want your first response, because the purpose of this experiment is to open a window into your mind.

My birthday party is not happening on Saturday due to a scheduling clash with my midlife crisis. The party will go ahead, but has been moved forward by three days.

What day will the party be held?

Did you answer Tuesday? Or Wednesday?

If the first, then you have what psychologists define as an ego-moving perspective on time. This means that you see time as a track that you run along. You are a forward-moving agent, racing towards your future.

If the second, your perspective is time-moving: you stand there, facing time’s incoming tide.

These two ways of perceiving time are not simply spatial metaphors. They express divergent psychological dispositions. I always give the second answer and rather wish that I did not. But it is fine to regard time as a mighty force, so long as you do not feel like its victim. View it as the vehicle of your life and it is easier to drive to your chosen destination.

Part One

How Time Went Crazy (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Includes: how time created consciousness; why Singapore is faster than New York; why delivery boys feared the noose; how wealth accelerates us but the costlier our hours, the poorer they feel; why we should listen to Steven Spielberg; the battle of the eyeballs; and what Socrates had in common with Thomas Edison.

1

Is the World Spinning Faster? (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Why time feels less free

This is the mystery:

We have more hours at our disposal than any humans in history. Few of us toil for the six 12-hour shifts that constituted our grandfathers’ working week. Many of us also enjoy flexible employment arrangements. According to current estimates, lucky citizens of the developed world may enjoy around 1,000 months on this planet. The average man’s life expectancy is 80 and is increasing by six hours a day. Women’s rate of improvement lags behind slightly at four hours per day, but given that their average lifespan is 83, they can afford to take it slower.

Better yet, what we can do with our time transcends anything yet seen on earth. Our present has been transformed by astonishing powers of telepresence. Own a smartphone and you can operate in multiple time zones, see, learn or buy pretty much anything, interact with almost anyone, whenever you wish, with a swipe of a finger, without leaving bed. Never have we been able to accomplish so much, so fast, with so little effort.

Yet despite these everyday miracles, many of us feel time poor. Why?

The short answer is that we are living in a new sort of time, and it is creating a new sort of us. Our instinctive response is to speed up, but we would gain far more from these glorious freedoms if we slowed down and concentrated.

This is not always welcome news. ‘I am fed up with being told to be “in the moment”,’ said my friend, when she heard I was writing about time. ‘Please do something about it.’

I feel her pain. I associate this advice with a certain kind of lifestyle guru – the wealthy, ex-film star kind, who has never ironed a shirt without a stylist or a camera crew to immortalize this act of humility. But although this phrase sounds like twaddle from certain lips, it is harder to dismiss if you recognize it as the echo of wisdom that reverberates across continents and centuries.

‘What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there,’ said the Buddha, two and a half millennia ago. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who beat a solitary retreat to Walden Woods, Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1845 to ‘live deliberately’ for two years, riffed on the same theme:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains … You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Anyone too busy to take off to a log cabin in search of enlightenment might be annoyed by Thoreau’s lovely words, since they imply we may be missing out on the times of our life. But that is a philosopher’s job, to ask the nagging question, how to live well. And there are signs that it is increasingly urgent.

The architecture of time in our lives is being dismantled at an astonishing rate, in an astonishing variety of ways. Previously, days were paced by work schedules, TV schedules, meal times, home time – with breaks built in; moments to rest, reflect, plan. These rhythms managed time for us. Now these boundaries are crumbling. Linear time coexists with flexitime, its disruptive pulse the irregular chirrup of smartphones. It is a social and technological revolution, with profound, personal consequences that we have been tardy to recognize.

This is the situation: as the steady and sequential are displaced by the instant and unpredictable, our time can be freer than ever. The complication is that this brings pressures and responsibilities. We need to manage time more actively or else we can feel we are falling apart.

Using time effectively is not an innate gift. It is a skill, though one sadly not taught in schools. We acquire it – some of us better than others – through interaction and experience. But nobody has inherited the cultural knowhow required for this new sort of time; our parents could not teach us, it is all too new. And managing time is itself a pressure that can make us feel we have less to spare.

You need not be Stephen Hawking to understand that time is a dimension. But, each waking moment, we also create our own sense of it. And when that sense alters, we behave differently too. Of course everybody’s relationship with time is always changing – we are all getting older; however, today’s changes are redefining the quality of experience. With small, practical steps, we can use it to improve our quality of life. Or alternatively, we can trip into the hurry trap.

Long ago, our ancestors depended on moving fast to survive. The fight-or-flight response was an emergency gear designed to speed them out of trouble. Today our tools and toys can do the fast for us. This is the great gift of our new sort of time, if we use it. We can custom fit our hours to suit us. If we really want, we can do what nine-to-fivers have always dreamt of and live like guitarist Keith Richards, Lazarus of the Rolling Stones, who for years slept twice a week – ‘I’ve been conscious for at least three lifetimes,’ he boasted – and, mystifyingly, grew old. (Note: the hazards of such a lifestyle include being crushed by a library, plummeting headlong from a palm tree and mistakenly snorting a line of your father’s ashes.)

This chapter explores why, rather than seize the freedom to set our own pace, instead we are speeding up – and how this is a problem.

1. Why time sped up

The twentieth century was the age of acceleration. Obsession with speed summoned planes, trains, automobiles and rockets, culminating in the design of a mighty particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, the construction of which began at Cern in 1998. Breaching human limits was of equal fascination.

Who does not want to go faster? In the 1950s a young neurologist decided to learn how. In particular, he wanted to find out why overdoing physical activity leaves us breathless. It was widely held that as muscles burn energy, lactate alters the blood’s acidity, increasing the nerve impulses to the brain – in effect saying ‘Breathe harder! Oxygen required!’ But he suspected something more: that when we push ourselves beyond a certain point our lungs cannot deliver enough oxygen, stopping us in our tracks. Sampling arterial blood could confirm his theory; however, opening an artery mid-workout was not safe. Instead he took the indirect route, recruiting a team of athletes, a treadmill and a stopwatch.

Each runner sprinted to exhaustion. After giving them a period to recover the neurologist called them back, strapping on facemasks that delivered oxygen in concentrations of 33 per cent, 66 per cent and 100 per cent (20 per cent is a normal concentration in air). Those who received 66 per cent saw a drastic improvement in their performance. Most went twice the previous distance. One finally quit out of boredom, another to catch a train. The hypothesis was correct. Stamina was a matter of both resources and willpower.

A few years later, distinguished exercise expert Professor Tim Noakes interviewed the neurologist. What was the most important limiting factor in exhaustion? The young man did not hesitate. ‘Of course, it is the brain, which determines how hard the exercise systems can be pushed.’

His answer is to be trusted. He too was an athlete. His name was Roger Bannister, and he well understood the mind’s power to overmaster time.

On the morning of 6 May 1954 Bannister was due to attempt to run the mile in under four minutes, which would make him the first man to do so. But he awoke to blustery winds, and these would add one second to each lap. His best practice time for a lap to date was 59 seconds, so triumph would require him to run faster than his sunny day’s best. He did not want to try, dreading failure, having already been vilified by the press for previous disappointing races.

He travelled alone on the train from London to Oxford, brooding on his dilemma. Apparently by chance, although surely by design, his coach, Franz Stampfl, was in the same carriage. Stampfl pointed out that Bannister’s rivals were due to race in the coming weeks. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘if there is only a half-good chance … If you pass it up today, you may never forgive yourself for the rest of your life. You will feel pain, but what is it? It’s just pain.’

Bannister arrived at the Iffley race track determined to run for his life. Later that day, three hundred yards from the finish, his pace lagged, his body exhausted.

There was a moment of mixed excitement when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew me compellingly forward. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. Time seemed to stand still, or did not exist. The only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality, even extinction perhaps …

With five yards to go, the finishing line seemed almost to recede. Those last few seconds seemed an eternity. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me only if I reached the tape without slackening my speed. If I faltered now, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would seem a cold, forbidding place. I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last desperate spring to save himself.