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

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СКАЧАТЬ on reams of studies, finds that a perky temporal outlook will produce a perky, productive human being.

      Want to test your attitude? Consider the following questions.

      1 What are your strongest memories and how would you describe your view of the past?

      2 What are you doing this weekend and why?

      3 What does the future hold and what matters most?

      A balanced perspective is marked by a warm sense of the past (happy memories, fondness of traditions) zest for the present, and positive plans. All of which sounds like a very long description of optimism. But consistent evidence lends weight to the theory. Future-orientated countries and individuals enjoy greater success (if slightly less hedonism) than present-orientated ones. Effective people tend to feel positive about both past and future. Those with precise, full memories are also better at making plans. The message is plain: the more connected you feel to yesterday and tomorrow – the greater your sense of life as a connection between past and future, the dead and the unborn – then the clearer your focus on time and your life potential.

      Ingenious methods exist to measure the breadth of our temporal horizon. Individuals with good impulse control – those who override temptations and cleave to long-term goals – evince warm feelings for their future self when their brains are scanned, regarding that imaginary being as they might a friend. By contrast, self-destructively impulsive people, unable to see far beyond their present, can feel as little for their future self as they would for a stranger.

      Of equal interest in our view of time is the role played by our sense of agency. There is the goal-setting approach, seen among individuals who chart their life course; then there is the fatalist, who are closer to corks bobbing on time’s current, whither fate takes them – an outlook, Zimbardo notes, found in certain religions, as well as in pessimists, suicides and terrorists. Any one of us can feel either way, our perspective fluctuating by the hour, the season, our circumstances. In times of suffering, well may you believe in cruel fate or feel that time is the enemy. ‘Of all things past, the sorrow only stays,’ wrote Sir Walter Ralegh from his cell in the Tower of London, awaiting his summons to the axeman. Past successes, like the introduction of the potato and the courtly fashion for smoking, had proven an inadequate amulet against Elizabeth I’s disappointment in him.

      Autobiographical memories are scripts that we use to tell ourselves who we are, what we like and how to get it. If the memories that you carry around like pebbles in your pocket fund self-limiting behaviour, you can bevel their sharper edges. Successful interventions conducted by Zimbardo and others with sufferers of post-traumatic stress and mental illness prove that a more enabling outlook on time can be cultivated. If that sounds close to brainwashing, consider how unreliable memory is, always editing. Perhaps our brain’s greatest gift is that it lets us forget so much that is dull or hurtful, instead spotlighting the peak experiences – the novelties, highs and lows – and giving them far more memory space than quotidian routine. This can mislead us into thinking that we had a wonderful trip or saw an incredible film because it ended well or there was one eye-wateringly hilarious incident, even – perhaps especially – if most of it was utterly unmemorable.

      Years of therapy are not necessary to shift your angle on the future or past. A research team at the University of Miami asked three hundred students to recall an incident when someone had hurt them. One-third were then invited to spend a few minutes describing the event in detail, dwelling on their anger and subsequent misfortunes. Another third were also asked to describe the event, but in this instance to explore the good that had flowed from it (what they had learned or gained in strength and wisdom). The rest simply described their plans for the next day. Afterwards all three hundred completed a questionnaire setting out how they regarded the person who had upset them. Not surprisingly, the second group were far more forgiving, less likely to want to avoid the person concerned.

      Spend a few minutes considering the profits drawn from a bad experience and you convert its value. Would your future look different if this kind of thinking became a habit?

      Directions for a time-rich outlook

      Past positive

      The capacity to look warmly to the past is a psychological bridging loan, funding confidence for tomorrow. Although, as a financial adviser is obliged to remind you, past performance cannot guarantee future success, think more about the past and at the very least you will find your memory enriched – a good idea, since people with detailed recall have greater facility at drawing up detailed plans. To improve your powers of recollection, make a game of remembering happy things from different phases of your life. Could you also prioritize family or local traditions? If melancholy memories surface, dig a useful lesson from them. (Being bullied was my education in compassion, for instance.)

      Present balance

      Some pleasures render us passive recipients or consumers, others make us powerful and purposeful. Try to privilege experiences that help you to feel the author of your life’s story, connected with the world. Zone in on what you are doing as you do it and moments are instantly livelier. Could you be more interested in people, or pick more absorbing tasks?

      Future positive

      It begins in the expectation: that time can deliver what you crave. But the slightest nudge in a hopeful direction lifts the mood. For this reason, always arm yourself with something to look forward to, be it a holiday or an emergency biscuit. You might seek to develop a clearer vision of who and where you want to be. To this end, work on your prospective imagination. Perhaps try a different point of view for size; reading a novel or memoir is a collaborative exercise in evocation. And start daydreaming about credible pathways towards your future: specific goals, detailed plans. Then set a date to begin.

MENTAL TIME TRAVEL

      Time holds us captive to paradoxes. We imagine that life is heading in one direction, yet the instant we enter the present, off time scutters into the past. Our minds grope for the future, yet our hopes are forged on the anvil of yesterday. In his closing words, The Great Gatsby’s narrator mourns the stale dream for which his friend lost his life: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

      Nothing can reverse time’s direction of travel. In his embarrassed memoir of serving as a German soldier in the Second World War, Günter Grass reflects on the gravitational pull of our past: ‘After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.’ By contrast, in 1940, German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing shortly before he swallowed a handful of morphine pills in preference to expulsion from Spain into Nazi hands, saw history as an angel blasted into the future, for ever looking back:

      His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

      Yet we can dart through time’s rubble to find solace and answers, as Machiavelli did in 1513, after the Medici tortured and then exiled him to his farm, to revive in the company of ghosts.

      When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, СКАЧАТЬ