During my summers in Maine, I try to take a break from the frantic pace of my normal life. I rarely look at my watch. If I need to follow the flow of the hours, the rhythm of the tides is plenty good enough for me. One summer several years ago, after a pleasant day kayaking in Quahog Bay, I decided to measure the passage of time in the late afternoon by the shift in light on the wall opposite a west-facing window. At this time of day, the sun’s rays streamed almost horizontally through the window, its mullions casting shadows on the wall. As the sun descended, the shadows shifted in a regular way. What an exquisite clock, a clock made of light! I was tempted to throw away all other time-keeping devices in the house.
The first mechanical clocks, using weight-driven escapements, were invented in Europe around A.D. 1300. With that development, people must have been intrigued and confounded to witness such a precise movement of time in the external world, in contrast to the internal irregularities of the body — the sporadic signals of hunger, the not quite predictability of menstrual cycles, the variability of thoughts, the vagaries of perception and memory.
Yet we found ways to harness the new instruments of time. Clocks could gauge productivity and work schedules in factories. Clocks standardized rail schedules. Marine chronometers measured longitude, critical for good navigation. More recently, highly accurate timekeeping has been essential for computers and GPS, which works by extremely precise measurement of the time for a radio signal to travel from a position on Earth to orbiting satellites.
Our ever-more-accurate clocks have been part of our ever-more-advanced technology. Just as we have conquered time, we have quantified and prescribed the world around us. Our bodies may be fleeting and frail, but we have become masters of time, and masters of the universe.
I would suggest that we no longer control time. Instead, time controls us. At least in the “developed” world, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which not a minute is to be wasted. The precious 24 hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced to 10-minute units of efficiency. We have become slaves to our “urgent” appointments and to-do lists. We become agitated and angry in the waiting room of a doctor’s office if we’ve been sitting for 10 minutes or more. We grow impatient if our laser printers don’t spit out at least five pages per minute. And we must be connected to the grid at all times. We take our smartphones and laptops with us on vacation. We go through our email at restaurants, or our bank accounts while walking in the park.
The teenagers I know (and some of their parents) check their smartphones at least every five minutes of their “free” waking hours. At night, many sleep with their phones on their chests or next to their beds. When the school day ends, our children are scheduled with piano lessons and dance classes and soccer games and extra language classes. Our university curricula are so crammed that our young people don’t have time to digest and reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning.
We have become addicted to nonstop external stimulation. A decade ago, some psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard did an experiment with college students on exactly that question. Each of the 146 subjects was required to sit in a chair, alone, in a quiet room, for 12 minutes. All external devices, including smartphones and watches, were confiscated. However, one type of external stimulation was allowed. A button next to the chair, when pushed, would administer an electric shock to the participant. Before the experiment began, the participants were asked to press the button just for practice. All of them reported that the shock was unpleasant, something they would avoid if at all possible.
Then the experiment began. One at a time, the subjects were asked to sit “for 10 or 20 minutes” (exactly how long they didn’t know, since their devices had been taken from them) with two rules: They couldn’t fall asleep, and they couldn’t get out of the chair. But if they wanted to press the button and get shocked, that was OK. The researchers found that 67% of the men and 25% of the women chose to shock themselves during the 12 minutes of the experiment rather than sit quietly with their thoughts.
The question is: What have we lost in our time-driven world? Among other things, we have lost the ability to waste time. And by “wasting” time, I don’t mean lazy idleness, but rather the willingness to spend time without an agenda, without a list of expected goals or accomplishments. We have lost the ability to let our minds wander freely, without schedule, a necessary foundation of creativity.
But there is another thing we have lost, more subtle and perhaps even more important. We have lost something of our inner selves. By inner self, I mean that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom. My inner self roots me to me, and to the ground beneath me. The sunlight and soil that nourish my inner self are solitude and personal reflection. When I listen to my inner self, I hear the breathing of my spirit. Those breaths are so tiny and delicate, I need stillness to hear them, I need slowness to hear them. I need vast, silent spaces in my mind. I need privacy. Without the breathing and the voice of my inner self, I am a prisoner of the wired world around me. I am a prisoner of external time.
A hundred and seventy-five years ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “We do not ride the railroad. The railroad rides us.” In Thoreau’s day, the new technology was the railroad. Today, it is the computer, the internet, the smartphone, and artificial intelligence. Technology itself is neither good nor bad. It is how we use it. And how we use our time.
The ancient Greeks had two different words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time. Chronos is quantitative time. Chronos is sequential time. Chronos is the relentless time that marches on mindlessly in the external world, oblivious to the lives of human beings. Kairos, on the other hand, is time created by events, often human events. Kairos is not necessarily measurable in minutes and hours. It might be the duration of a season, or of a trip in my kayak, or of a love affair. When an event of human significance occurs, it occupies a great deal of kairos. When insignificant, its kairos might be nothing at all. Kairos time is forever. It is the time of memory. It is the time of being. In the rush and heave of our modern world, a world we have created ourselves, we need to embrace kairos. We need to reclaim ourselves.
