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

For Ethiopia’s Konso, the hour from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. is kakalseema (‘when the cattle return’). The word is so sumptuous, you could stretch out on it and swoon. By contrast, an appointment at 17.30 has an icy ring. It embodies the difference between a life organized by numbers and according to personal experience.

Few of us are tugged along by the rhythms of livestock, crops or the sea’s moon-bound tides. But we continue to weigh our days by events: what happens and what we make happen. If, come evening, we cannot account for ourselves – if the day passed in a forgettable rush – we can feel at best frustrated, at worst panicky. In the same way that studies find we are far better at fathoming how long it will take to reach a destination using landmarks than numbers, so time gathers meaning for us from landmark occasions. Not just from big celebrations, but all the moments when our experiences are distinct enough to fashion into stories we can tell one another; then, life makes sense.

Multiple clocks have a hand in shaping our lifetime: social clocks, physical clocks. Many are cyclical, from the fiscal year to the twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle or the twenty-four-hour rollercoaster of the testosterone cycle. Not forgetting our metronomic heartbeat, and ageing – all too visible in growing children, the shrinking old, and any mirror (failing eyesight is a kindness of age).

There are so many versions of time to choose from, yet if I try to picture it, I see a ruler, subdivided into units. Here I stand in the middle, the past behind me, the future before. This feels entirely authentic, yet it is a product of my scientific culture. The philosophical Roman statesman Seneca, writing in AD 65, a less geometric age, saw a lifetime instead in ‘large circles enclosing smaller’ – banded by childhood, youth and maturity, like tree rings.

It is only when I try to think how I feel about time that the importance of event time surfaces. Because cyclical time is what grips my heart. From mild indignation when a birthday rolls around, to the March thrill of strolling along streets lined by magnolia trees, their boughs shivering with ballerina blooms ready to dance in the spring, to my pangs walking into Holland Park to find my favourite horse chestnut already an orgy of gold, autumn’s first ravishment before setting about the oak next door. These events come sooner each year, until soon – too soon – there will be less time before than behind me. They remind me that all I love is temporary; life is not cyclical, and winter’s frost is already upon me – inconvenient truths no hair dye can refute. Yet still it moves me to know (grace of Robin Robertson’s poem ‘Primavera’) that Britain’s spring walks ‘north over flat ground at two miles an hour’.

Events may be as inevitable as the flush of autumn, or as unguessable as a black swan. But they are a benign organizing principle for life. Build days around occasions that matter to you, and time’s march will root you.

4. Your view of time, your quality of life

One gusty evening in February 1969 a student sat in her college room, writing, when she heard the seven-twenty bell, summoning her to dinner. She was mid-paragraph in an essay due the next morning, yet the bell was hard to ignore. Until a few weeks earlier Karen Armstrong had been a novice, and to a nun, time is ‘the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter’. Each hallowed moment, ‘no matter how trivial or menial the task’, was a sacrament commanding obedience.

At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately … It had become second nature to me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence.

But it had never happened. Heartbroken, faith lost, she left the convent’s rule. Nothing seemed sacred. So, this night, unwilling to cast off her train of thought, she carried on writing then strolled over to the college dining hall, into the stunning roar of four hundred young people and tutors eating supper. After years at the convent, where conversation was a vice strictly rationed, she was shocked – but more so by what followed: ‘Instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.’

This peculiar episode resonates not simply because it shows how hard it is to shed the habit of God. Those dominated by time are often disconcerted to discover that views and rules relating to it vary enormously.

Ask an Australian aboriginal when she won the lottery or lost her mother and she might say very recently – even if these events occurred years ago. This would not be untrue because, to her, time is not purely linear; it also moves in circles, radiating outwards from her at the circle’s centre. As a result, the more important an event is, the closer in time it feels. This elegant image is true of us all at a psychological level. Like magnets, significant events bend our perception of time. Our memories feel closer to the surface, or vivid, ‘like yesterday’, if they mean something to us.

We apprehend the future in the same way. A major occasion – be it an exam or a wedding – always, research finds, seems closer than its calendar date, looming delightfully or menacingly. This not only distorts our perspective but influences our actions.

What we tend not to notice is how, as a by-product of our experiences and expectations, we precipitate an attitude towards time itself – as if it were a force with a distinct personality. We see ourselves as always late, running to stand still, chasing after inexhaustible time. Or time is a lunatic whirligig; thrilling, fun, but a mite repetitious. Even if this view reflects reality, its feedback effect, like a prism, refracts the facts in another direction.

You might argue that our attitude towards time shifts from moment to moment – shit happens, we feel shit, then a shaft of pleasure shifts our barometer. True. But research finds that if you scrape away momentary differences, people tend to have a stubborn viewpoint that, like a compass, can set their life’s direction. Our minds habitually use single events to predict how we will behave in the future; psychologists call it ‘bundling expectations’. Let a mood crystallize into a belief – see time as divinity, friend or foe – and our behaviour shifts, determining whether we attack life or wait for it to happen. Expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies due to consistency bias (the term for our tendency to act in accordance with our self-image).

This is useful to know. Great swathes of your day may be hired out, subservient to others’ whims, and you may have a limited say in what you do. But you can control your attitude. Budge the mood, expect better, and outcomes can improve.

It is worth a try. Persistent, nagging time stress, however trivial, becomes a chronic condition. Simply being exposed to multitudes of things happening at once percolates a state of constant expectation that is cognate with anxiety. This is the tax we pay for all those incomplete tasks, unsent or unread emails, grating Facebook posts, pieces of paper on our desk, meetings whose action points we have yet to enact, if they hum in our minds. This is why we write them down. Cognitive dumping outsources stress; an improvement, until to-do lists become the bully. Catalyze this stress into a permanently embattled perspective towards time and the minor magnifies: everything seems urgent, overwhelming; impatience becomes our default mode, and rush unavoidable.

What would a positive attitude towards time look like? I like this view, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a model of eloquent rage written in horror at the tumbrels, guillotines and desecrated churches across the Channel: ‘Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn.’ Despite the legalistic language, for me it summons an interlocking chain of hands, reaching from the graves of the past to the cradles of tomorrow: the bond of trust required, as Burke saw it, to seal the deal that society offered – that is, to support all human interests. Current psychological research takes a similar view of what might be the healthiest attitude an individual can hold towards time. It has a catchy name: the balanced time perspective. It was invented by Philip Zimbardo.

Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison experiment, a notorious 1971 study in which adults played prisoners and guards in a fake prison. Things got dark, fast. Guards grew sadistic, prisoners depressed and passive. Zimbardo killed the experiment in consternation after three days as it teetered into abuse and the man playing the role of prison governor – Zimbardo himself – fell in with it. What this proved, if proof were necessary, is that much behaviour is a function not of innate character but of habitat: we follow the rules of our environment. Uncomfortable information after the genocidal complicity that marked Hitler’s Third Reich.

Since then, Zimbardo has sought to understand how to steer character for the better. His research, based on reams of studies, finds that a perky temporal outlook will produce a perky, productive human being.

Want to test your attitude? Consider the following questions.

1 What are your strongest memories and how would you describe your view of the past?

2 What are you doing this weekend and why?

3 What does the future hold and what matters most?

A balanced perspective is marked by a warm sense of the past (happy memories, fondness of traditions) zest for the present, and positive plans. All of which sounds like a very long description of optimism. But consistent evidence lends weight to the theory. Future-orientated countries and individuals enjoy greater success (if slightly less hedonism) than present-orientated ones. Effective people tend to feel positive about both past and future. Those with precise, full memories are also better at making plans. The message is plain: the more connected you feel to yesterday and tomorrow – the greater your sense of life as a connection between past and future, the dead and the unborn – then the clearer your focus on time and your life potential.

Ingenious methods exist to measure the breadth of our temporal horizon. Individuals with good impulse control – those who override temptations and cleave to long-term goals – evince warm feelings for their future self when their brains are scanned, regarding that imaginary being as they might a friend. By contrast, self-destructively impulsive people, unable to see far beyond their present, can feel as little for their future self as they would for a stranger.

Of equal interest in our view of time is the role played by our sense of agency. There is the goal-setting approach, seen among individuals who chart their life course; then there is the fatalist, who are closer to corks bobbing on time’s current, whither fate takes them – an outlook, Zimbardo notes, found in certain religions, as well as in pessimists, suicides and terrorists. Any one of us can feel either way, our perspective fluctuating by the hour, the season, our circumstances. In times of suffering, well may you believe in cruel fate or feel that time is the enemy. ‘Of all things past, the sorrow only stays,’ wrote Sir Walter Ralegh from his cell in the Tower of London, awaiting his summons to the axeman. Past successes, like the introduction of the potato and the courtly fashion for smoking, had proven an inadequate amulet against Elizabeth I’s disappointment in him.

Autobiographical memories are scripts that we use to tell ourselves who we are, what we like and how to get it. If the memories that you carry around like pebbles in your pocket fund self-limiting behaviour, you can bevel their sharper edges. Successful interventions conducted by Zimbardo and others with sufferers of post-traumatic stress and mental illness prove that a more enabling outlook on time can be cultivated. If that sounds close to brainwashing, consider how unreliable memory is, always editing. Perhaps our brain’s greatest gift is that it lets us forget so much that is dull or hurtful, instead spotlighting the peak experiences – the novelties, highs and lows – and giving them far more memory space than quotidian routine. This can mislead us into thinking that we had a wonderful trip or saw an incredible film because it ended well or there was one eye-wateringly hilarious incident, even – perhaps especially – if most of it was utterly unmemorable.

Years of therapy are not necessary to shift your angle on the future or past. A research team at the University of Miami asked three hundred students to recall an incident when someone had hurt them. One-third were then invited to spend a few minutes describing the event in detail, dwelling on their anger and subsequent misfortunes. Another third were also asked to describe the event, but in this instance to explore the good that had flowed from it (what they had learned or gained in strength and wisdom). The rest simply described their plans for the next day. Afterwards all three hundred completed a questionnaire setting out how they regarded the person who had upset them. Not surprisingly, the second group were far more forgiving, less likely to want to avoid the person concerned.

Spend a few minutes considering the profits drawn from a bad experience and you convert its value. Would your future look different if this kind of thinking became a habit?

Directions for a time-rich outlook

Past positive

The capacity to look warmly to the past is a psychological bridging loan, funding confidence for tomorrow. Although, as a financial adviser is obliged to remind you, past performance cannot guarantee future success, think more about the past and at the very least you will find your memory enriched – a good idea, since people with detailed recall have greater facility at drawing up detailed plans. To improve your powers of recollection, make a game of remembering happy things from different phases of your life. Could you also prioritize family or local traditions? If melancholy memories surface, dig a useful lesson from them. (Being bullied was my education in compassion, for instance.)

Present balance

Some pleasures render us passive recipients or consumers, others make us powerful and purposeful. Try to privilege experiences that help you to feel the author of your life’s story, connected with the world. Zone in on what you are doing as you do it and moments are instantly livelier. Could you be more interested in people, or pick more absorbing tasks?

Future positive

It begins in the expectation: that time can deliver what you crave. But the slightest nudge in a hopeful direction lifts the mood. For this reason, always arm yourself with something to look forward to, be it a holiday or an emergency biscuit. You might seek to develop a clearer vision of who and where you want to be. To this end, work on your prospective imagination. Perhaps try a different point of view for size; reading a novel or memoir is a collaborative exercise in evocation. And start daydreaming about credible pathways towards your future: specific goals, detailed plans. Then set a date to begin.

MENTAL TIME TRAVEL (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Time holds us captive to paradoxes. We imagine that life is heading in one direction, yet the instant we enter the present, off time scutters into the past. Our minds grope for the future, yet our hopes are forged on the anvil of yesterday. In his closing words, The Great Gatsby’s narrator mourns the stale dream for which his friend lost his life: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Nothing can reverse time’s direction of travel. In his embarrassed memoir of serving as a German soldier in the Second World War, Günter Grass reflects on the gravitational pull of our past: ‘After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.’ By contrast, in 1940, German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing shortly before he swallowed a handful of morphine pills in preference to expulsion from Spain into Nazi hands, saw history as an angel blasted into the future, for ever looking back:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Yet we can dart through time’s rubble to find solace and answers, as Machiavelli did in 1513, after the Medici tortured and then exiled him to his farm, to revive in the company of ghosts.

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

The licence of mental time travel – adventures with other minds, ways of being and thinking – lets us surpass ourselves. This was demonstrated amply by Michel de Montaigne, a sweet-tempered landowner, so-so city mayor and middling winemaker, who thwarted his native idleness to invent a new artform. His Essays, published in 1580 and still in print, offered wisdom truffled indiscriminately from fields, friends and the larder of antiquity. This came naturally: he was a man out of his time, something of a living fossil, like the coelacanth (a fish rediscovered sixty-six million years after it was supposed to have been extinct) – stuffed to the gills with classical learning because his eccentric father decreed that he should only hear, think and speak in Latin from the age of three. (Neatly closing the door on the possibility of an intimate relationship with his testy mother, not to mention his father, who spoke no Latin at all.)

Montaigne grew into an adult fascinated with but detached from life, acutely conscious that his world was no less bizarre or ephemeral than that of the ancient Romans he knew so intimately. Not surprisingly, he became adept at gambits of mental time travel, reporting gleefully how once he used them to relieve a fresh-minted widow’s grief by tiptoeing conversational manoeuvres – ‘gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote’. To ward off depression at his impending death he summoned memories of youth to ‘sidestep and avert my gaze from this stormy and cloudy sky that I have in front of me’.

Artful mental manoeuvres can change the future. Great Britain’s Hollie Webb was twenty-five years old and one of her team’s youngest players when she approached the goal to take the deciding penalty in the 2016 Olympics’ women’s hockey final. A single strike to win Britain’s first gold in this event, or lose it. Few actions lasting under a second have such weight upon them. Webb looked, swiped … smack! Smack again as the ball rang off the back of the goal. ‘I watched it go into the net and then I can’t remember anything else since then. We practise them so many times and I just tried to imagine I was training at Bisham Abbey. I knew what I was going to do against their keeper, so I just stared her in the eye.’

Betraying no fear, giving away no clue as to where she would aim, was important, but more so was that Webb reduced the time’s pressure, conceiving of the shot as simply the latest in a sweaty queue of such moments. Telling herself she was doing something ordinary allowed her to be extraordinary.

If mental time travel offers a refuge from the present, it can also draw life from the past. David Alliance left school in Tehran at thirteen to toil in the Grand Bazaar, then landed in Manchester in 1950 with £14 and a dream of starting a business. He was to create the largest textile company in the West. As age dimmed him, he developed a technique to reinvigorate himself that might have been whispered by Montaigne’s ghost:

When I was exhausted after a long day of doing business, I would close my eyes and become a little boy again in Kashan: the sun beat down on the courtyard of our family house and the ground was too hot for my bare feet. I could smell the dry desert air and feel the warmth of the sun, a sensation so real that sometimes it brought sweat to my brow. My father and sisters were there, and there was love and laughter and security. When I opened my eyes, I would find myself back in an office in Manchester, but refreshed and full of energy, ready to get on with the task at hand. I did this even in board meetings and no one in the room ever guessed the journey I had just been on, or understood how I could recover my energies so rapidly … sometimes, when I cannot sleep, I take a virtual walk through the bazaar, past my father’s office and on through the cool alleyways, remembering happy times there. And then I’m relaxed again.