January 6, 2010 by djackson.

“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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December 18, 2009 by djackson.

Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.

- Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, lines 552-553

Well, Chaucer’s miller may have been able to butt down doors but my own talents in that direction are much more modest. I woke up today to say the morning office before heading to the gym. The house was cold so I went into the laundry room to retrieve my watch cap. The night before, we had hung up some clohtes to dry on the door frame - you know, the kind of knit stuff that you can’t put in the dryer. (Or at least, you can, but only if you want to end up with doll clothes.) Anyway, in the act of ducking under the haberdashery I whammed my noggin against the jam. I split it nicely down the middle - my head, not the door - which resulted in a fun trip to the ER. They glued it shut (Becky asked if they could do my mouth while they were at it) and now I have this lovely Frankenstein slash about two inches long between hairline and eyebrows. In the vast expanse of forehead I sport it stands out like a neon beer sign in a convent. All of this besides the whacking headache.

The worst of it, of course, it that now I have to tell that bland and embarrassing story to everybody I see for the next week or so. Makes me feel like such a klutz. The ER nurse commented that I have the blood pressure and pulse of an athlete, but it was hard to preen myself much over that point given the circumstances. Unlike Henry V’s yeoman soldiery I cannot strip my sleeve and show my scars/And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.” It occurs to me that I could always engage in a little revisionist history, perhaps tell people that Jack Swagger caught me with a folding chair during our cage match on RAW? Or maybe mutter something under my breath about the modern world being no place for unicorns?

So it’s not the injury; it’s the embarrassment. Doubtless had I been St. John (Revelation 4.1) I would have stumbled at the threshold of glory and bled all over the twenty four elders. When, at the end of the play, the Lord finally appears in his blood-boltered BDU’s I’d blush to think that at least some of the stains came when he had to mop up my gushing noggin (Revelation 19.13). And perhaps that’s just the point. Spiritually or physically, I am willing to suffer but not to look silly, to be injured but not to be inept. And yet maybe a good deal of living in the Kingdom of Heaven means getting comfortable with just that concept. There is a set of scars in that heavenly throne room that reflects intention instead of inattention, sacrifice instead of sloppiness, heroics instead of moronics (Revelation 5.6). As for the rest of us, probably even the martyrs beneath the altar cuddling up in the white-robed warmth of anticipated vengeance, we mostly bear the whips and scorns of our own outrageous stupidity. We’ve slammed our stubborn heads against the solid doorposts of holiness; we’ve pitted our sinful flesh against God’s righteous law and learned - multiple times, but each one as if it were a fresh discovery - that it is our flesh that gives. We can violate God’s laws but we can’t ultimately break them.

And perhaps, in the end, that’s what we have to offer - the goofy evidence of our felix culpa, the sinful stumbling that provides an opportunity for our Lord to show how much he loves us. Melville’s Captain Ahab hated his peg-leg (and the whale who made it necessary) because it reminded him of his mortality. “Here I am,” he puffs while getting fitted for a new limb, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” Injury creates humanity, and, even worse, community, and Ahab’s self-concept can’t stand it. In the end it kills him and virtually everyone around him.

So here, Lord, I offer you my busted head as a tribute to your greatness. I also offer you - a two-for-one bargain suitable to the season we’ve transmogrified from your Son’s birth - all the brickbats of witticism I’ll have cracked across my already-cracked dome. (”You must’ve made Becky really mad!” “It wouldn’t be so bad if you had some hair to cover it!” You know the sort of thing, Father.) Like David doing the dance of the seven skivvies before the Ark of the Covenant, I will be yet more undignified in your worship. It isn’t much, I grant you, but it’s what I have.

However: I have a free copy of my book, The Fountain, for whoever comes up with the best alternative version of how I got this zipper up the middle of my face. The decision of the judge is final.

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December 11, 2009 by djackson.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. - Luke 2.18