Overtaking time
“I
n the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”
Alfred Whitehead
Callous, remorseless; if it had eyes they’d be the dead eyes of a shark. Though some physicists tell us time cannot exist it’s no less psychologically real to us, and we live with its predations.
...until the tables are turned and instead of killing time we’re wondering where it went.
Surprising then how often the fight is taken to the predator. “Killing time is the chief end of our society” observed the Italian jurist and playwright Ugo Betti. We have no more or less than we are given and that we don’t know, yet we choose to squander it; will it to go faster. And paradoxically the longer we exist the more adept we become at this, until the tables are turned and instead of killing time we’re wondering where it went.
The phenomenon of time going faster with the years is a well documented one, if sometimes exaggerated; disturbing too — an unwelcome reminder of our mortality. Think back to the first time you experienced this, and the sense of disquiet, fear even, that accompanied it. It’s easy to imagine the myriad mid-life crises and spiritual awakenings the phenomenon has caused; hardly surprising the search for explanations, in lieu of solutions.
It’s these explanations and their worth that interest us.
The seemingly simplest account of why time speeds up with age is mathematical. As the years increase, the proportion of our lives represented by any given period of time is correspondingly reduced. A year or five years at 50 seem less significant than at 20, or 24 say (let’s give those young frontal lobes enough time to develop), because we’ve had more of them. Consequently the time at 50 appears to go faster. We can’t argue with the logic, yet it hardly does justice to the richness of dynamics involved. It’s too dry, too pat, too backward looking. And the implication of acceleration increasing exponentially, so the older we become the ever more fleeting our lives, doesn’t ring true. Moreover it ignores the influence of psychological factors. Worst of all it offers no hope of solution. It is as abstract and pitiless as time itself.
Another common account puts the phenomenon down to the increasing pace of life. With more responsibilities and activities demanding our attention, time necessarily seems to fly faster. There are too many individual differences in lifestyles unaccounted for in this explanation. It has all of the superficiality and none of the mathematical plausibility of the previous one.
A third popular explanation for why time seems to be running away with our lives bases its argument on the direction of mindset. Where do we tend to live our mental lives — in the past, the present or the future? The assumption is that older people tend to spend a greater amount of time occupied with the past, perhaps because there’s more of it, and this somehow accentuates the perception of time passing quickly. Whereas children and younger adults are obsessed with what is to come, tomorrow or next month, and the waiting weighs time down. This explanation merely assumes a causal effect.
It seems to us a distinction needs to be drawn, between the perceived speed of time over a lengthy period of our life — a month, six months, a year, or more — and distortions in estimates of shorter time intervals, an hour or a day. The latter situation has seen a good deal of experimentation recently from psychologists looking to determine the mechanisms in the brain responsible for so called “interval timing”, with suggestions that dopamine level, known to decline with age, holds the key. The fact that dopamine, and stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine make short intervals appear to go faster is no indication they can account for the phenomenon over longer periods. That’s reductionism masquerading as psychological explanation.
But if not in these explanations, where does the answer lie? Over a century ago, not long before his death, the English social novelist George Gissing explained things thus “It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When everyday is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.”
To be too familiar with life is to render it un-mysterious...
Of all explanations this seems to us the most compelling. In part because of its elegance of expression, but more because the words and their nuances capture so well how life is lived at the extremes. The contrast between “familiarity” and “a step in the unknown” says it all. To be too familiar with life is to render it un-mysterious. And when the mystery is removed, when all is certain, what is the point of existence? In his Apology, Plato has Socrates observe as death approaches, “an unexamined life is not worth living”.
Perhaps the key to slowing down the acceleration of time lies then in the honest pursuit of knowledge. But the briefest introspection will reveal the opposite to be true. Rather than lengthen our day, such a dedication to learning will assuredly shorten it. As it will when we lose ourselves in other enjoyable pursuits; the more intensely pleasurable the experience the faster time must appear to pass.
We overtake time by engaging ourselves in the things around us, by responding to the opportunities life is constantly offering...
It is not through the intensity of our actions that we reverse the acceleration of time, but through curiosity, through attending, through the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” — coupled with a habit of exploration. We overtake time by engaging ourselves in the things around us, by responding to the opportunities life is constantly offering and most of us are constantly ignoring. “Where observation is concerned”, said Pasteur “chance favours only the prepared mind.”
The knock of opportunity is often a muffled one. But time is more than chronos. It has its other side too, its benevolent and hopeful side, kairos. We prepare to recognize the moment knowing that it will come, and when it does act on it in a balanced way — so achieving opportunity, the experience, and the memory.
In his poem Burnt Norton,one of four meditations on time, T S Eliot contemplates a world of things that might have been: “Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose-garden.” An interested life would not just take the passage, open the door and find the rose-garden, but find also things to explore there and enjoy — while registering the moment.
An interested life would cheat time.
SOURCES
Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and
Praxis,
Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Eds),
Age and the Meaning of Time, Susan H. McFadden and
Robert C. Atchley (Eds), Springer Publishing Company,
George Gissing, The Private Passions of Henry Ryecroft, at www.fullbooks.com
“Teach your brain to stretch time”, Caroline Williams, New Scientist, February 2006
Alfred Whitehead Adventures of Ideas,
Louis Pasteur, Lecture, 1854
T S Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, The Complete Poems and Plays, faber and
faber,
