I have a love-hate relationship with time, because there are so many things I have to do, as well as so many things I like to do. My whole life long, time has passed too quickly, forcing me each day to leave undone things I wished I had done: a long bike ride, a leisurely weeding session in the garden, an uninterrupted hour of piano practice, cooking a really creative meal, curling up with a good book after dinner, organizing the file boxes in my attic which hold a lifetime of work. Time "triage"--choosing what I can do and what I cannot in the time available each day--is a constant challenge.
The only way to escape time's presence in my life is to be dead, an option I do not find, at this point, very attractive. So how do I befriend time, rather than resisting its hold on me?
In this, as in so much else, I can learn from the wisdom of nature. Discovering how other species experience time gives me some perspective.
Judith and Herbert Kohl, in their book The View from the Oak[1] (supposedly written for children), describe a "moment in time" as the fastest change that a living creature can notice. They suggest that we look at other species through an imaginary "time microscope" that would allow us to see changes that we are not ordinarily able to observe.
Suppose, for example, I were a female spider. I would be aware of moments through movements that a human being could not even perceive. Tiny vibrations in my web would tell me when an amorous male was approaching, and I would send messages through the same silken telegraph to warn my offspring when danger was looming.
If I were a dolphin, I would be able to distinguish moments of sound as high as 200,000 cycles per second. Human beings who tried to listen to me would be put in the position of someone who tries to hear a Shakespeare play on television with the sound on the set turned off, for humans can only distinguish sounds up to 15,000 cycles were second.
What if I were a bee? Someone watching what seemed like random buzzing would never guess that I was performing an elaborate dance lasting only thirty seconds, moving my antennae and body to tell my friends that there was honeysuckle growing on the fence exactly twenty-three feet northeast of the hive.
If this fast-track animal world makes me feel breathless, I could choose instead to look through a "time telescope" to observe the world of the very slow. What would a moment--the fastest perceivable change that can be noticed--be for a snail? If I were that creature, my world would move at what has accurately been called a "snail's pace." The fastest movement I could even perceive would be 1/4 of a second. (To understand what that means, imagine that four taps per second on the back of your neck felt like constant pressure!) According to naturalists, who somehow have managed to discover a snail's view of life, if I saw the quick movement of a bird flying toward me with open beak, grass blowing in the wind, or cars speeding by, I would think they were standing still.
The creatures who share the planet with me know their own rhythm instinctively. It is unlikely that you will find a snail with a Type A personality, or a bumblebee with chronic fatigue syndrome. How can we Homo sapiens find the rhythm that is natural to us, enabling us to live in harmony with time?
The problem is that, unlike the rest of the animal world (or so people think), we humans are conscious of the passage of time, and usually anxious about it as well. We are anxious because there are so many things to be done, and because time is what is carrying us forward in life towards its inevitable end. It is a problem that affects our bodies, our minds, and our spirits, usually in negative ways, such as high blood pressure, discontent, and depression.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was riding my bicycle up a small hill (there are only small hills in our part of Ohio) and noticing the rhythm of my breathing. Perhaps we can begin becoming comfortable with the world of time just by doing that, I thought: observing the breath!
For we are a species, too, with our own rhythm, our own pace. And that pace is built into our bodies, our heartbeat and our breathing. No wonder that meditation, in which the practitioner sits quietly observing the breath, is calming: it is one of the few times when we notice our own tempo.
As we notice our own tempo in breathing, perhaps we'll begin to notice other signals from our bodies that will help us live "in time." Perhaps we'll begin to notice, for example, when we're tired, whether it be because of a long morning of work outdoors in the summer or the early darkness of a winter evening. Maybe we'll notice when our muscles are tense because we're overwhelmed with the pressure of too many things to do and not enough time to do them.
And then maybe we'll think about the bees and the snails. They just live their lives, moment by moment. From our human perspective, some of their moments are unimaginably short or incomprehensibly long. But I think that they do not worry about the next moment, or the moments that have passed.
We humans tend to drag our past moments into our present ones in unhelpful ways, regretting that we cannot re-live them. Or else we forget the moment we are in because we are thinking about future moments. We try to live all our moments at once.
When my long list of activities begins to overwhelm me, I like to remember the advice of the fourteenth-century sage Meister Eckhardt: "Wisdom is simply this: to do the next thing that has to be done, to do it with all your heart, and to take delight in doing it."
Eckhardt reminds me that the time in which I live is not the past, nor is it the future. While it is wise to learn from the past, and to prepare for the future, I do not live there. I live here. Now.
Time moves inexorably from moment to moment. We can resist that fact, or celebrate it. Nature reminds us of that reality every day. The dancing bee, the creeping snail, the blossoms unfolding in the sunlight and closing at dusk, the seasons in their ceaseless cycle, all help our species to cope with the fact of time, and to live fully in the present.
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[l] Judith and Herbert Kohl, The View from the Oak: The Private Worlds of Other Creatures (San Francisco/New York: Sierra Club Books/Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977).
Nancy Roth is having the time of her life in Oberlin, Ohio, where, at various moments, you can find her occupied with writing books and articles, teaching creative movement to young children, leading spirituality workshops for adults, practicing the piano, chairing a local grass-roots activist group, tending her garden, attending to her ministry as an Episcopal priest, and keeping in touch with family and friends.
�1999 Talking Leaves
Winter 2000
Volume 9, Number 3
Human Time, Natural Time
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