Time, Times, and Half A Time

“Time,” asserts Shakespeare’s character Rosalind in act three of “Twelfth Night,” “travels in divers paces with divers persons.” The witty heroine then offers to explain “who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.” For those keeping score at home, the final breakdown looks like this:

Trots: with a woman between her engagement and her wedding, when seven days seem to take seven years.

Ambles: with lazy preachers who do not bother to study for their sermons.

Gallops: with a condemned prisoner, for whom the day of his execution seems to arrive without interval.

Stands still: with lawyers between cases; “for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves.”

Turns out that in this, as in so many things, the Bard was way ahead of his time. Recent research reveals that our activity within time shapes our perception of time. We don’t do well with long intervals between meaningful events, so we feel that time oozes past us. Pixel-quick activity, by contrast, compresses our sense of time like an MP3 file. Also, we tend to perceive dramatic moments as more recent in time than the clock or the calendar claim. And here’s a fun one: if I lie to you about how much time has passed while you engaged in a particular activity, you will most likely conclude that you must have been having fun.

This is on my mind because, of course, we just flipped the world’s odometer and started what we are pleased to designate a “New Year.” Of course, the flip of a calendar page does not change anything. It merely creates the opportunity for change. And the move from 12/31 to 1/1 has no more specific gravity in the actual world than the pivot from, say, 5/14 to 5/15. Still somehow the fact that lots of people view this moment as an open invitation to alter one’s life stirs up a certain energy in the psychological atmosphere and I figure I might as well give it a shot.

Abba Disocorus of Namisias, used to make one resolve every year: not to taste cooked food, not to eat fruit, not to speak - all that standard Desert Father stuff. “This was his system in everything,” the record says. “He made himself master of one thing, and then started on another, and so on each year.” I think the one thing I want to master this year is time. That’s it: this year, I resolve to have more time.

And apparently, I can. After all, if time largely consists (as both Shakespeare and science say it does) of my perception of passing events, I can to some extent control how fast it moves, and therefore how much of it I have. And, ironically enough, if I want to have more of it I must do less in it. It reminds me of what the great Seneca chief Red Jacket said when someone complained about not having enough time. “Well,” he remarked, “I guess you have all there is.” We hurry up in an effort to “save time.” The wisdom of several different disciplines seems to be counter-intuitive on this point: hurry does not save time; it uses it. Hurrying in order to save time is like driving faster so you can get home before you run out of gas.

I don’t want to live in the time-cramped cubes of an event-flush schedule. I want to discover a certain spaciousness in life, an openness that finds time for everything and, therefore, for everyone. I want time to open before me in broad vistas, not narrow down to the cross-hairs of my to-do list so that I become time’s sniper, picking off the seconds like targets for assassination. Becky says that she can tell galloping time has left its hoof prints down my back when she walks in to my study and sees my physically hunched, hands hovering over my keyboard and body tensed to move in six different directions. I don’t want to do that anymore.

So what’s my plan? Ironically, it moves in two seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand, I resolve to waste less time. But I reserve the right to define what I mean by “waste.” Quick-march, isolated activities chew up seconds in a million micro-bites like a swarm of locusts devouring acres of crops. Rapid-fire dives into social networking, hit-and-run emails and texts, drive-by conversations that spray words like hollow-points - these activities amount to murdering time by means of efficiency. They leave me impatient with those who interrupt me because such people cannot be expedited and must instead be experienced. Kipling wrote that one mark of a man is the ability to “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.” I resolve to do that - instead of overfilling the unforgiving minute with ninety seconds worth of jogging in place.

On the other hand, I resolve to waste a lot of time. But I reserve the right to define what I mean by “waste.” Sitting and staring slows the flow of time to the point where renewed activity cannot fully recover its frenetic RPM. I cannot control time, but I can condition it. So I resolve to be bored more often, to feel time hanging heavy on my hands, not like the dead weight of drudgery but like the substantial feel of solid gold. I think that an hour in bed with the Sunday paper might be the best way to accomplish things for the rest of the week - and a more pleasing offering to God than the thousand rams of my busyness and the ten thousand rivers of my well-oiled efficiency.

Oh, one more finding from the scientific studies: stimulants like caffeine amp up our perception of the passage of time. But I’m not giving up coffee; I just want a little more time - not an eternity.

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