About Time

A week or so after lock-down, I took off my watch. When Blake spoke of ‘mind-forged manacles’ he was presciently describing the mechanism attached to my wrist. In normal times, I cannot imagine how often I looked at it, fretting about the amount of time I had left to complete a task or to begin the next. Like many young people’s addiction to their mobile phones, I was addicted to time.

Carpe diem

It began, no doubt, as an exercise in efficiency. Like some obsessive 1950s time-motion researcher, I was constantly challenging myself to do more, create more, and achieve more in ever decreasing amounts of time. Time was running out, and I was desperate not to waste one second. If I had a motto, it would have been ‘Carpe diem’-seize the day. If I had a poem that summed up my mind-set, it would be Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and its famous lines:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near

Andrew Marell

And I was certain that I was right. After all, this is the message of a world which is constantly urging us to buy and do everything, now! FMO – fear of missing out propels millions to cram every last experience into every day so that it can be posted online. The irony is that rushing through life brings little in the way of satisfaction and while I thought I was so cleverly using up time; it was using up me.

Hitting the reset button

And then, quite out of nowhere, came lock-down and the opportunity to reset my life. Though I didn’t fall into the extremely vulnerable category, I was certainly someone who would do well to self-isolate. Succumbing to Covid-19 may not kill me, but it would almost certainly cause complications and involve an extended recovery period and quite frankly, I’d had enough of feeling ill.

My crammed diary was suddenly empty and my days my own. Time, for once, didn’t really matter. At first, it felt a little disorientating and I kept looking at my diary for what I should have been doing and looking forward to the date when lock-down would end.

I set up elaborate structures for my day including time for exercise, learning, socialising remotely and projects. My diary was once again reassuringly full and my days too. It seems old habits die hard. But I was beginning the process at last.

Listening to the body

The first thing I did was let myself sleep. With all the craziness and anxiety surrounding those first few weeks, I was exhausted. And for once, I didn’t set an alarm, but let myself doze until I was ready to face the day. There were times when I slept twelve hours straight, but gradually, gradually, I moved to something more normal (though I still need more sleep than most.)

The second major change was having meals when we were hungry rather than by the clock. My husband was home and I wasn’t making endless calculations regarding when to prepare dinner. We started when the first stirrings of hunger hit. (In my husband’s case, these were every few hours.)

Circadian rhythms

Our bodies have their own clocks known as the circadian rhythm; ‘a 24-hour internal clock that is running in the background of your brain and cycles between sleepiness and alertness at regular intervals.’ (sleepfoundation.org)

These rhythms are based on sunlight or its absence causing us to feel sleepy at night and awake through the day. This biological mechanism is strong and when we try to trick it, we suffer. Night shifts, long haul flights and even a shift in daylight saving time can leave us feeling tired and muddle headed for days.

Our body clock is amazingly powerful, but our mental clock can be more powerful still. While our physical clock ticks away in harmony with the natural world, our internal, mental timepiece tends to follow linear time rather than the cyclical time of nature. It ranges along the continuum of our existence leaping from past to present to future in milliseconds – a sort of mental time travel.

Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist, explores this in his book, Your Brain is a Time Machine. Time travel for humans has a valuable function: our ability to predict (and therefore plan for the future) is ‘reliant on memory’ (a recollection of the past).’In fact, that’s really the main evolutionary use for memory, as a storehouse of the information needed to predict the future.’
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2132847-your-brain-is-a-time-machine-why-we-need-to-talk-about-time/#ixzz6OIANPIin

Putting it simply: we learn from our mistakes and try not to repeat them. For example, if we burn our hand on a cooking pot, our brain stores that memory and warns us not to do the same in the future. In this way, our mental time travelling aids us.

However this vital, evolutionary tool, comes with its own disadvantages.

The perils of time travel

Throughout most of man’s history, the work of staying alive would have engaged all our mental and physical powers. Hard physical labour would mean deep sleep at night as exhaustion took over. Now our lives are physically so much easier, many struggle to sleep and these hours (and others) are often spent in reliving moments we regret or worrying about the future. These twin activities result in the modern epidemic of depression and anxiety.

Lock-down has extended our free hours, giving many leisure time that, rather than proving restful, feels like the small hours of the morning suffered by the insomniac. Too much unstructured time simply isn’t good for us. Our brains need stimulation or they will turn inwards – seldom with good results.

Time is on my side

For me, my mindfulness practice has been my best defence. Like everyone, I have moments of sadness, despair and anxiety about the future. No-one is immune from missing those they care about – no matter how good virtual communication is. And few are spared from anxiety regarding how the pandemic will affect them – whether in health, economic stability, or in bereavement.

Keeping sane requires reminding oneself that in this moment everything is okay. There is little we can do aside from following guidelines and should catastrophe strike, we are best fit to deal with it if we ourselves are strong.

If we can, we might also use this experience to unshackle ourselves from time – allowing it to drift and expand naturally through the day. Of course, we will need to use a clock sometimes: for phoning friends, baking cakes or joining meetings. But these times can be noted on our phone – and mine has numerous alarms for different days.

Through slipping into the flow of time, we often find that it expands rather than contracts. Tasks become enjoyable when unhurried and tackled with full attention and care. We become more calm. And the greatest paradox of all is that we can achieve a great deal seemingly effortlessly. The days still fly by and though I regularly have to resist the urge to cram in too much, I am learning. Just as I trust in the arrival of dawn tomorrow, I trust that the hours the day will bring will hold the same potential for discovery and joy as any other. What I make of my time is up to me.