we are going. Time’s script gives us history, identity, accumulating meanings, reasons to stay alive.
If time is foundational to our being, physicality defines how we conceive it. Concepts of time and space are interchangeable in indigenous languages, such as the Karen’s of Thailand. Soon is ‘d’yi ba’ – ‘not far away’. Sunset might be ‘three kilometres away’ (if that is how far you could walk in the time it would take for it to arrive). Similarly, we think of time as an independent, often impatient being – time ‘races ahead’ or we are ‘behind’ it. These metaphors are pale shadows of beliefs in time as independent divinities, like Kairos or Chronos. But the main reason that we see time as a moving spirit and life as a journey is that we are upright apes, striding on two legs, facing ahead. If a spider, jellyfish or side-shifting crab spoke of time, doubtless its vocabulary would be different.
No doubt it is also because we are upright apes, who like to move on, race, climb, get ahead, that many of us feel contented only if we are metaphorically getting on – in a career or romance, or ascending a social ladder. Our craving for a sense of destination in life’s journey (once we called it heaven) is preferable to the depressing alternative: to see life in purely physical terms, as a wizened decline unto the zero of death. How much better to mark life’s milestones with accumulating numbers, from your first birthday to your hundredth, evoking achievement, progress: a story from a lifetime.
Today, though, linear time has a challenger: our superfast, flexible hyperdigital telepresent. As a result, holding onto a sense of life as progressive – or simply getting through our plans from start to end – can be a trial. Operate on too many channels simultaneously and attention frays. This is dislocating. Time can resemble less a comforting anchor than a harrying tormentor. How much better to feel led by event time – placing your actions at the centre of a life that unfolds in meaningful chapters?
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