Saturday, March 06, 2010
Time is precious; how best to use it?
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen.
-- Henry David Thoreau
A cup of tea with my mother,
looking at each other,
enjoying our tea together.
The point in life is to know what's enough.
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.
-- Gensei, 1650
Time. How utterly, unspeakably precious this scanter-than-gold commodity -- currently unavailable on the open market -- grows with each passing season.
Perhaps age makes the value of time more obvious. Or perhaps the age does -- our digital age, in which complications multiply exponentially with each passing year.
"Multiply!" announce unopened e-mails in the archives of my inbox -- auto-invitations sent "by" various friends, through some formerly popular networking site. "You've Been Added!" announce later subject lines -- to someone's friend list, I reckon, on some other Web site I don't visit.
I know these sites are useful and fun, full of updates from students, kinfolk and friends, photos of their journeys and back yards and hound dogs I might happily peruse for hours. They're also an expedient way to keep in "touch" with the appearances of people and to Multiply Connections.
But what if I don't want to Multiply? Or Add, or even Duplicate? What if I need to Subtract, now and then--to sink under the surface, at least long enough to think?
It seems the surface-book of life is so dizzyingly busy already, one craves a regular dive out of the horizontal blur to disappear downward, into the dark, quiet, comfortingly slow subterranean.
How else can time be stopped from spilling across our many flat surfaces and allowed to go "vertical," down to the roots of things? How else can a person pause, ponder, look up through many flat layers of time, and make another kind of "connection"?
Ancient times
Recently I read one of Plato's depictions of Socrates on his way to a dinner party. His friend Aristodemus narrates to the other guests how, in their walk toward the party, Socrates "fell into a fit of abstraction and began to lag behind."
Where'd he go? The party host sends someone out looking for Socrates, who is found standing in a trance on the neighbor's porch. The concerned host insists that Socrates be brought forcibly into the party, but Aristodemus advises against it.
"You'd much better leave him to himself. It's quite a habit of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is."
Socrates later shows up, midway through the dinner, which Aristodemus considers remarkable punctuality "for him."
Known for his entranced bouts of inner listening, his "fits of abstraction" and "aporia" (or "wonderment"), Socrates was rarely "on time" in the chronological sense.
"What would poor old Socrates do today?" I sometimes wonder. The more natural circadian cycles of time and season to which the ancient Greeks were attuned has long given way to a linear, far-speedier chronology.
I wonder about it in terms of education, politics, media, human psychology and, not least, conservation.
If the genius Socrates needed time out even from that slower-paced world, just to stand still and ponder, is there any hope for us, zipping along at warp speed, rarely able to stop even long enough to see how drastically we are altering the world?
Time out
I recently dug back through economist Jeremy Rifkin's "Time Wars" for help. Rifkin and other researchers, two decades ago, had begun noticing the effects of computers on humanity's perception of time.
"Computers require constant engagement," writes Rifkin. "The mind is never allowed to stray from the immediate action unfolding on the screen."
This "pinned-down" condition of attention prevents the mind's eye from retreating inward to contemplate or imagine. What does that do to "time"?
Rifkin quotes a 12-year-old. "It's like falling asleep and thinking you've only been asleep fifteen minutes when you've been sleeping the whole night. You try and figure out where the time went. It went into the computer."
British educator John Davy, discussing computer-based educational programs, notes that while they seem to "connect" everyone with certain data, they offer "no smells or tastes, no winds or bird song, no connection with soil, water, sunlight, warmth, no real ecology."
In the 20 years since Davy and Rifkin were observing this, we've realized our kids no longer "get out much" -- among the trees, creeks, gardens or fields. Neither do adults.
The mere fact of this has become such a cliche, it's pointless to discuss. Yet I doubt we realize what it's doing to our collective sense of time, or our ability to allow nature its own due time.
But I'm out of time -- and space! We'll ponder on it another day.
Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.
