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.
In 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, Bannister had changed history. But he would be prouder of his later achievements, becoming a leading authority on the autonomic system – the hidden clock that controls the most vital beats in your life and mine, our heart and breathing rate.
The lessons of Bannister’s early breathing experiments are transferrable. We can increase our pace, mental or physical, given the right resources. But our mind is in charge. Unless it has the means to remain in control, speed wears us out, fast. Yet we can test the limits, and even feel, as he did in Iffley, that time no longer exists. Controlling time makes us powerful if we take choices.
So what do you want to do today?
Perhaps this seems a frivolous question. Perhaps you are fully occupied by what you need to do. Before you answer, it is worth reflecting that your ability to ask it is a privilege unique to our species.
‘We all have our time machines, don’t we,’ wrote H.G. Wells in The Time Machine. ‘Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward, are dreams.’
Being aware that one day we must die is the cruellest term of the human condition. But to compensate, we also have the capacity to appreciate that since