On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ our experiences are distinct enough to fashion into stories we can tell one another; then, life makes sense.

      Multiple clocks have a hand in shaping our lifetime: social clocks, physical clocks. Many are cyclical, from the fiscal year to the twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle or the twenty-four-hour rollercoaster of the testosterone cycle. Not forgetting our metronomic heartbeat, and ageing – all too visible in growing children, the shrinking old, and any mirror (failing eyesight is a kindness of age).

      There are so many versions of time to choose from, yet if I try to picture it, I see a ruler, subdivided into units. Here I stand in the middle, the past behind me, the future before. This feels entirely authentic, yet it is a product of my scientific culture. The philosophical Roman statesman Seneca, writing in AD 65, a less geometric age, saw a lifetime instead in ‘large circles enclosing smaller’ – banded by childhood, youth and maturity, like tree rings.

      It is only when I try to think how I feel about time that the importance of event time surfaces. Because cyclical time is what grips my heart. From mild indignation when a birthday rolls around, to the March thrill of strolling along streets lined by magnolia trees, their boughs shivering with ballerina blooms ready to dance in the spring, to my pangs walking into Holland Park to find my favourite horse chestnut already an orgy of gold, autumn’s first ravishment before setting about the oak next door. These events come sooner each year, until soon – too soon – there will be less time before than behind me. They remind me that all I love is temporary; life is not cyclical, and winter’s frost is already upon me – inconvenient truths no hair dye can refute. Yet still it moves me to know (grace of Robin Robertson’s poem ‘Primavera’) that Britain’s spring walks ‘north over flat ground at two miles an hour’.

      Events may be as inevitable as the flush of autumn, or as unguessable as a black swan. But they are a benign organizing principle for life. Build days around occasions that matter to you, and time’s march will root you.

      4. Your view of time, your quality of life

      One gusty evening in February 1969 a student sat in her college room, writing, when she heard the seven-twenty bell, summoning her to dinner. She was mid-paragraph in an essay due the next morning, yet the bell was hard to ignore. Until a few weeks earlier Karen Armstrong had been a novice, and to a nun, time is ‘the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter’. Each hallowed moment, ‘no matter how trivial or menial the task’, was a sacrament commanding obedience.

      At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately … It had become second nature to me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence.

      But it had never happened. Heartbroken, faith lost, she left the convent’s rule. Nothing seemed sacred. So, this night, unwilling to cast off her train of thought, she carried on writing then strolled over to the college dining hall, into the stunning roar of four hundred young people and tutors eating supper. After years at the convent, where conversation was a vice strictly rationed, she was shocked – but more so by what followed: ‘Instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.’

      This peculiar episode resonates not simply because it shows how hard it is to shed the habit of God. Those dominated by time are often disconcerted to discover that views and rules relating to it vary enormously.

      Ask an Australian aboriginal when she won the lottery or lost her mother and she might say very recently – even if these events occurred years ago. This would not be untrue because, to her, time is not purely linear; it also moves in circles, radiating outwards from her at the circle’s centre. As a result, the more important an event is, the closer in time it feels. This elegant image is true of us all at a psychological level. Like magnets, significant events bend our perception of time. Our memories feel closer to the surface, or vivid, ‘like yesterday’, if they mean something to us.

      We apprehend the future in the same way. A major occasion – be it an exam or a wedding – always, research finds, seems closer than its calendar date, looming delightfully or menacingly. This not only distorts our perspective but influences our actions.

      What we tend not to notice is how, as a by-product of our experiences and expectations, we precipitate an attitude towards time itself – as if it were a force with a distinct personality. We see ourselves as always late, running to stand still, chasing after inexhaustible time. Or time is a lunatic whirligig; thrilling, fun, but a mite repetitious. Even if this view reflects reality, its feedback effect, like a prism, refracts the facts in another direction.

      You might argue that our attitude towards time shifts from moment to moment – shit happens, we feel shit, then a shaft of pleasure shifts our barometer. True. But research finds that if you scrape away momentary differences, people tend to have a stubborn viewpoint that, like a compass, can set their life’s direction. Our minds habitually use single events to predict how we will behave in the future; psychologists call it ‘bundling expectations’. Let a mood crystallize into a belief – see time as divinity, friend or foe – and our behaviour shifts, determining whether we attack life or wait for it to happen. Expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies due to consistency bias (the term for our tendency to act in accordance with our self-image).

      This is useful to know. Great swathes of your day may be hired out, subservient to others’ whims, and you may have a limited say in what you do. But you can control your attitude. Budge the mood, expect better, and outcomes can improve.

      It is worth a try. Persistent, nagging time stress, however trivial, becomes a chronic condition. Simply being exposed to multitudes of things happening at once percolates a state of constant expectation that is cognate with anxiety. This is the tax we pay for all those incomplete tasks, unsent or unread emails, grating Facebook posts, pieces of paper on our desk, meetings whose action points we have yet to enact, if they hum in our minds. This is why we write them down. Cognitive dumping outsources stress; an improvement, until to-do lists become the bully. Catalyze this stress into a permanently embattled perspective towards time and the minor magnifies: everything seems urgent, overwhelming; impatience becomes our default mode, and rush unavoidable.

      What would a positive attitude towards time look like? I like this view, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a model of eloquent rage written in horror at the tumbrels, guillotines and desecrated churches across the Channel: ‘Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn.’ Despite the legalistic language, for me it summons an interlocking chain of hands, reaching from the graves of the past to the cradles of tomorrow: the bond of trust required, as Burke saw it, to seal the deal that society offered – that is, to support all human interests. Current psychological research takes a similar view of what might be the healthiest attitude an individual can hold towards time. It has a catchy name: the balanced time perspective. It was invented by Philip Zimbardo.

      Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison experiment, a notorious 1971 study in which adults played prisoners and guards in a fake prison. Things got dark, fast. Guards grew sadistic, prisoners depressed and passive. Zimbardo killed the experiment in consternation after three days as it teetered into abuse and the man playing the role of prison governor – Zimbardo himself – fell in with it. What this proved, if proof were necessary, is that much behaviour is a function not of innate character but of habitat: we follow the rules of our environment. Uncomfortable information after the genocidal complicity that marked Hitler’s Third Reich.

      Since then, Zimbardo has sought to understand how to СКАЧАТЬ