Sure, I know the saying goes, “Time is God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once,” but it often feels like that concept isn’t working. We dart out of the house and dive into the car for work because “time is money.” Bills have to be paid on time, the dinner groceries have to be hunted and gathered on time, and appointments need to be stressed over and finally cancelled. It feels like everything is happening all at once.
“I just don’t have time” is the standard lament, and it’s literally true. We don’t have time – it has us. (Think about the word “deadline,” or the phrase “drop-dead date.”) Is there any way to beat the clock? I don’t think so. Nor is there any way to reason with it or outwit it. I think the best we can do is to sign a peace treaty with time, agreeing to fill it with better, slower things.
On the long-awaited summer vacation in southern Colorado, you’re finally able to let time spread out a little. What a relief! Camping in a place like the Great Sand Dunes, in the Sangre de Christo range, you can leave your watch in the glove compartment and let time express itself naturally. After all, what real difference does it make if it’s 3 or 4 in the afternoon? When you let time take a break, reality is simplified to three remarkable events: sunrise, high noon and sunset. No worries!
It becomes too much of a chore to keep track of the day, let alone the hour. When even brushing your teeth becomes enjoyable, you’re back in synch with real time. Cooking breakfast – an eight-minute, every-second-counts stunt back at home – becomes a decompressed, mindless opportunity to combine colors, smells, textures, tastes and sounds of nature with daydreaming, and meandering conversation. If the pancakes burn, cook some more – there’s plenty of time.
“The modern mind,” writes Wendell Berry, “longs for the Future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven.” Berry argues that we’ve been conned into believing that the present is something we need to escape, because it’s not good enough. We can’t be here now because we don’t have enough money, enough gadgets, or a large enough house. We’re not yet powerful enough or “happy” enough to live in the present. The truth is, if we’re satisfied with what we have in the present, we’re less likely to be good, solid consumers. So the supply-side of the economy has invested trillions to engineer dissatisfaction into our shell-shocked psyches. Leisure, love and laughter can best be had in the future, we begin to believe, but we can’t put our fingers on where that disturbing idea came from.
Trish and I sat on top of a huge sand dune, digging our bare feet into the cool sand beneath the surface. I realized how badly I needed a “mindwash.” Maybe I could enter one end of the vacation all grimy – like a car entering a carwash – and emerge from the other end as a calm, centered human being. About half a mile away, her kids were doing mindless, joyful gymnastics on a sand bunker near the creek – we could hear them very faintly, laughing and screeching. Completely in the present, they were, completely at the Sand Dunes on a sunny Wednesday morning – or was it Thursday? Hypnotized by snow-capped mountains in the distance, I wondered how much time there was in the huge dune we sat on top of, if it somehow became the grains in a gigantic hour glass.
Historians tell us the impetus for subdividing time into units smaller than hours was the unbearable longevity of Christian sermons in the Middle Ages, which often droned on for two hours or more. In self-defense, churchgoing tinkers manufactured smaller sand glasses to measure half-hour and quarter-hour time periods. (The Egyptian sundial and water-drip timepiece – both invented about four to five thousand years ago, preceded the sand glass, invented in Europe around 100 A.D.)
But the world’s most familiar face – the clock – didn’t emerge until the 13th century, in Benedictine monasteries. Since the sixth century, St. Benedict’s cardinal rule, that “idleness is the enemy of the soul,” had echoed through the silent stone hallways of Benedictine orders, and now the elders had an unerring instrument to keep idleness at bay. St. Benedict’s well-meaning preoccupation with orderliness may have transformed the social order of our species, nothing less.
By the late fifteenth century, the clock had come out of the cloisters and become the central feature of the town square. The newly emerging bourgeois class, a vigorous, mercantile bunch of folks, quickly adopted and replicated the clock, correctly sensing that it could make them rich. Not that country folk readily surrendered to synchronization — it took a few hundred years for the clock to midwife the Industrial Revolution. But the die was cast. The gears were already in motion.
Until the clock came on the scene, medieval folk adjusted the rhythms of work and leisure to natural cycles. They organized their lives by the calendar, a tradition- and ritual-oriented device. Calendar cultures commemorate ancient legends, historical events, heroic deeds of gods, and the phases of moon, Earth, and Sun. What the clock brought was a schedule-regulated culture. We became hungry for the future, obsessing about human productivity per unit of time. We became Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, hanging precariously from the gears of the clock, and later, the soccer mom, speeding frantically across town to pick her kids up at two different ball fields.
A week into our schedule-free vacation, time and Colorado had worked their magic. Slowly climbing a boulder-filled trough towards the sky above Crested Butte, I was right on the verge of Fundamental Knowledge about time, because I was in it. I knew consciously that time is the sun’s course across the sky, yes, but it was also the gradual, relentless erosion of the very mountain I was climbing. Time was what separated me from Susan, who moments ago had gone back to camp because of the thunderheads brewing in the northwestern sky. Time was the day-by-day aging of my own body; now well past the halfway mark. It was the meteorites we’d seen last night, streaking from hundreds of thousands of years away – and it was stars that weren’t even there anymore. It was the lupines and delphiniums in living color every summer, and it was the Western Tanager’s migration from Colorado to Guatemala and back – I knew all this from fifty years of living.
But subconsciously, as the clouds whipped by ominously overhead, I knew something much more basic, and humbling. I conceded that clocks all over the world would continue to spin mindlessly through their daily cycles, and that when I got back, the meetings and deadlines would drag me back to the rhythm of the clock. But right at that moment, I was unhurried, square in the center of calmness. Right at that moment, time was on my side.
