Time after Time

Did you just put the clocks forward? Does it drive you mad? I am late writing to you tonight- not because I am late, but like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the clock is against me.

Lewis Carrol enjoyed the absurdity of Time - as we humans manage it. The White Rabbit scutters through Wonderland in a permanent state of clock-driven anxiety. The Mad Hatter is stuck at 6pm. Forever having a tea party where there is no time to wash up the previous dishes before the next ones are needed. There’s no time to make any tea at all.

Does that feel true for you?

The speed of life makes it hard to enjoy what time has to offer… which is… time.

There’s always something that needs doing. We’re running late, we’re catching up, we’re making time, we’re losing time, so often time is wasted, because we’re stuck in traffic, the flight is cancelled, we’re staring at the screen buying stuff we will send back. We’re hypnotised by the time-thieves of social media. One more scroll, one more hit.

Leisure-time, for adults and kids, is rarely unmanaged, it’s activity-based. An experience. An outing. Gym. Sport. Maybe an exhibition or a show. Time Off is usually Time On. And when it isn’t, it’s TV. There is nothing wrong with the sofa and a movie. Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with going out on the weekend. What modern humans seem to be missing is time where there are no distractions. Where we are alone with ourselves, or alone in the presence of another, maybe reading, or painting, or wood-working, playing an instrument, or doing whatever you like doing with mind and hands, that feels like freedom. It might be a walk without your phone. It might be a swim in clear cold water. It might be lying on the grass under the moon.

That kind of time is not time-bound. That kind of time doesn’t cost money. That kind of time has been devalued. In our world, unless a human is physically asleep, that human is expected to be ‘doing’. And for many millions that means extra jobs, juggling home and work, the pressure of a roof over your head and food on the table. There aren’t enough hours in the day to get by, let alone to be alone. To breathe deeper.

How to find a pocket of air in an upturned boat?

Nothing in our society recognises or prioritises the simple need of the human mind to flow. Flow is where kids are, playing happily in a make-believe world. Flow is where artists are, making something that doesn’t exist. Flow is playing the piano because you can. Flow is working in the garden, skills of mind and muscle memory. Flow is when you hit your stride or your stroke and you feel at one with the woods or the water. Flow is focus, absorption, a not-needing anything else. It happens in meditation or yoga. It happens when we are fully present. Flow is indifferent to clock time. Flow is in tune with with your own deeper rhythms. Flow is not a means to an end. It is completeness.

And of course we can’t be in that state all the time. But we need to be in that state some of the time. It is the best prescription for mental health I know. And it’s hard-wired at birth. Every kid can do it/be it, until you give them an iPad and teach them that gadgets and distractions are the answer to everything. Then, there is no more inner time. There’s schooltime, playtime, mealtimes, study times, holiday time, bedtime, screen time. And we become adults with work and leisure time. Strapped to linear time, moving faster and faster, with no access to inner time, or what religion sometimes calls significant time - that’s what ritual is designed to access - a way out of the busyness of our lives, into a sense of the being of our lives.

Religion has done a lot of damage, I know, but religious insight guides us to understand that time happens differently on the inside of us - in memory, in reflection, in honouring what, and who we value, in not forgetting what is gone, just because that time has passed. We bring what we value from the past into the present - a Be Here Now, that refuses simple divisions of clock- time, and recognises what is shared across real time.

All religions tell us that what happens every day in Toytown is not where we should be putting all our psychic and emotional energies. This is not the sum. The idea of a Soul is a a wise corrective, not to the Body, but to the utter triviality of so much that demands time and attention. We are worth more.

Taking time to be with a friend, to be with ourselves, to be with our kids, is a taking, it’s true, but we need to ask ‘What is this time I am taking? First of all, it’s mine, and if I don’t take it for myself, what happens to it?’ Taking time to read a book - something I find so many people say they don’t do anymore. Might as well not take time to sit down to dinner…Oops. is that your microwave pinging as you head for Netflix?

I do not know why humans wage war on what it means to be human. The way we live is like an auto-immune condition where the body turns on itself. We have lost sight of our own well-being. Our own best interests. Our human nature.

This isn’t a cry to retreat from the world or to build a secular monastery called Home. We have to engage. To live in the world - but that calls for courage and self-awareness. What do you need to be you?

We have to go to work, pay our bills, try to raise our families as best we can, and that mops up a lot of time. Yet, there is more time available to us than we believe, once we determine to find it. To find it because we need it. To find it because it is ours. It’s like when you fall in love, and suddenly there is time for this massive new demanding thing dropped in your life like a comet, even though your life is full to the brim already.

And I know in my own life, that if I don’t take time for what appears to be unproductive loafing ( Walt Whitman loved that word) then the productive stuff suffers. I suffer. I am not a machine. Neither are you. Human doing/human being. It has to be both.

In fact, I think this coming week I shall re-read Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass.

Being takes Time.