Never enough done. Never enough time.
We need time in all its dimensions in order to live fully and well. Daydreams. Plans for the future. Spontaneity. Time for reveries about nothing. And the ability to think things through, then carry them out in linear, organized stages, not chaotic flexitime.
I will defend unto death your right to fritter away your time, but having it stolen is another matter. Throw it away and we are complicit. Control is the heart of the matter: it is what makes us feel that we are living by our own priorities, or constantly racing to catch up. That way lies the hurry trap.
Fast incites us to speed up, but changing our response changes the situation. The range of choices available to us may be daunting, but slow down and you can exercise them. No need to turn your back on the wonders of this fast-forward world. Transformation is available at the point where you encounter it, the bit that you are in charge of. You.
To survive in a world without limits is simple. Set your own.
When I am in a flap – texting, talking, eating, fixing meetings to discuss meetings I did not attend – I often think of the fly in Aesop’s fable, the one who sat on the wheel of a chariot crying, ‘What a lot of dust I raise!’
‘How are you?’ friends ask.
‘Busy.’ I may smile, but basically it is a non-answer, just one boastful notch up from ‘Fine’. Like a stock cube, the word condenses life’s banquet into a deadly four-letter word. This makes it ideal for shutting down unwelcome lines of conversation. Curiously, although everybody understands that busy is dull, it is our proudest alibi for whatever we do all day. Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, suspected that a lot of busy is a time-filling tactic – one that enlarges the vacuum it aims to fill:
The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time that is ‘empty’. Paradoxically enough, this bulging time is often frighteningly empty when viewed in retrospect.
In the short term, busy makes us feel important, the buzz of even bogus tasks generating a seductive sensation of efficacy, like static fuzzing a TV. But while engaged in our frenzied show of bustle, what are we omitting to do? It is a question posed by two very different men, both of whom transformed civilization in their way.
The first was Socrates, a lapsed stonemason with a face like a punched potato, who is said to have cautioned, ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life.’ By all accounts he lived out this philosophy, downing his tools to become a free-range teacher. He roamed Athens with a retinue of wealthy students, collaring citizens with sly questions that made them feel silly, expertly getting up the noses of the elite while leaving his wife to bring up their three sons, whom he ignored. Until 399 BC, when he was put on trial as a public menace. The guilty verdict brought a choice: exile or execution. Typically, he argued that leaving Athens was not worth the bother and downed a cup of hemlock. A noble death, wept the flower of Athenian youth, perhaps forgetting Socrates’ family, left with neither wealth nor a noble name to protect them.
Socrates became the wellspring of Western thought without writing a word (he left that to students such as Plato). It is tempting to take his warning against busyness for the counsel of the original dude. But he was too subtle a thinker to underwrite a slacker manifesto. Why else would his warning have been echoed twenty-four centuries later by the most industrious man in history?
‘Being busy does not always mean real work,’ said Thomas Edison. ‘There must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose. Seeming to do is not doing.’ Edison was an arch doer. The indefatigable wizard of Menlo Park’s inventions, including the phonograph and film camera, secured 1,093 patents in the US alone and sired several major industries. ‘I have got so much to do and life is so short,’ he told a friend. ‘I am going to hustle.’ Edison had a simple scam for packing it all in: pickpocket time. On average he worked eighteen maniacal hours a day (up to sixty on the trot for truly intractable puzzles), snatching a few hours’ sleep a night and taking restorative daytime catnaps in one of the cots that dotted his workstations. By the age of forty-seven he estimated his true age was eighty-two, since ‘working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time’.
You may shudder to measure your life’s output in Edison years, and no healthcare provider would recommend it. Fittingly, it is thanks to him that everybody’s day stretches beyond its natural limit, courtesy of the light bulb.
I doubt whether Socrates’ and Edison’s definitions of a time-rich life would have had much in common. However, both recognized a timeless danger: if you mistake frothing from task to task for meaningful activity in its own right, you will fizz about like a pill in a glass of water, expending vast amounts of energy on increasingly invisible returns. It is also a licence for rudeness and thoughtlessness, for avoiding events we do not want to attend, relieving us from the responsibility of interrogating our choices. Not my fault: I’m just too busy! Margaret Visser, a historian of everyday life, wrote:
‘No time’ is used as an excuse and also as a spur: it both goads and constrains us, as a concept such as ‘honour’ did for the ancient Greeks. Abstract, quantitative, and amoral, unarguable, exerting pressure on each person as an individual, the feeling that we have no time escapes explanation and censure by claiming to be a condition created entirely out of our good fortune. We have ‘no time’ apparently because modern life offers so many pleasures, so many choices, that we cannot resist trying enough of them to ‘use up’ all the time we have been allotted.
In reality busy is a hollow word, a descriptive term for effort; it reveals nothing about whether that effort is productive, purposeful or a waste of disorganized time. Next time I feel busy, I will ask myself, what for?
Part Two
What is Time and Where Does it Go?
Includes: why time was a god, then a gift, then a bully; how your view of time shapes your life; what is the point of a femtosecond; the joy of cattle time; what happens when you lose time sense; why seconds slow down in sinking ships; how to think faster – although time-poor thinking makes us stupid; why distractions are addictive; why Roman philosophers hated hanging around; and what Hilary Mantel and Hamlet gained from procrastination.
2
Why we invented it, how it reinvents us
Sometimes I wish that nobody had invented clocks. Then my days would not be chopped into miserly minutes. I would have all the time in the world.
It is a sweet fantasy. But I need not hunt far to find it. This is the land of time that our toddler inhabits, and what a merry place it looks. How he howls if we urge him to hurry while he is studying a marathon of ants on a pavement, or try to scoop him up before he has patted the last jag of jigsaw into place. Often we ignore him; we have to bowl him off to nursery on time, into his bath on time. But how he blossoms on weekends when the day ebbs and flows with the hunger, curiosity and vitality that set the beat of his clock.
‘Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being,’ advised psychologist James Hillman. ‘It’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit it’s right here.’ If this is bliss, my son has it. Ask when something happened and he answers, ‘Yesterday.’ Ask when something is going to happen and he smiles, ‘Today?’ then gets back to what he was doing. The only clocks he respects are dandelions, because his present consists of whatever present thing grips him.
Children