Recently I read Jonathan Haidts’ well-researched and cautionary book The Anxious Generation. There is much to say about it (which I intend to do in future blogs and podcasts). What it got me thinking about was how we relate to time itself. Not having enough time. Needing things in shorter blocks of time, 30 second reels instead of 500 page novels. How hour after hour is spent in mindless scrolling to release stress, and yet we seem to have no time for meditation, contemplation, ourselves, and each other.
And so I decided to dig a little deeper. Is it the “quantity” of time that we are having trouble with? Or is it our definition and interpretation of time?
Sure enough, since Lao Tzu of China, Augustine of Hippo, Dogen of Japan, Whitehead of Oxford, Krishnamurti of India great philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and metaphysicians have explored the nature of time.
I believe this exploration may do more than any specific time hack we could put into place.
Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), the French Philosopher had some very insightful reflections on this essential question. Here is my own exploration of views on time, inspired by his work, and hopefully challenging all of us to think freshly about things so fundamental to our experience and worldview.
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An exploration of different views on Time, challenging us to think freshly about things we ordinarily take for granted.
WE TAKE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF TIME FOR GRANTED. But not that long ago, in 1922, a young Albert Einstein and a decade older Henri Bergson, one of the most beloved and respected French philosophers of the time met in Paris for a public discourse on the nature of time. Part of the debate was what the Theory of Relativity might mean about our understanding of time. Also under scrutiny was the role and purview of science and the scope of philosophy. Was science the right benchmark for our inner experience? Was its authority creeping beyond its expertise? If science claimed to be the measure for all experience, would it end up obscuring other ways of knowing that were more true to and that enriched our human experience?
At the time Bergson was the unquestioned victor of the debate.
However, over the next few decades, scientism won out.
Scientism won out, in spite of contradictions and gaps in logic, to such a degree that now we rarely deeply question our measurement of time in relationship to our experience of time. A philosophical or metaphysical view has been relegated to the realm of the odd, the flaky, and those that are unable to live in the “real” world. What is that real world? What is being discounted by the way we currently (but didn’t always) define what is known?
There is, without doubt, validity for both perspectives, within their own domains. The more I reflect on our contemporary anxiety about time and our futile efforts to control, further regiment, plug ourselves into schedules, slot our relaxation and free thinking into available minutes in our daily schedule with increasingly diminishing results, the more I feel something essential is missing from our view.
It is not simply human weakness that has led to this predicament. The prevalence points to a more pervasive substratum, a set of beliefs and perspectives that we rely on to define our experience and reality.
Yes we are more busy than ever it seems. It is not just that our technology has sped up our lives, bringing less leisure, even as it promises more. With manual labor saving devices, we could become deep contemplatives. Yet we are farther and farther from that as a cultural value.
I think much of our existential anxiety arises from our anxiety around time. We fear we do not have enough of it. We fear we are not “spending” our time wisely. We “waste” and “squander” time. We “buy” time. How did time, the mark of being or existence, morph into a commodity we proffer in a transactional exchange? What does that mean about our relationship to our experience? What has happened to our sense of the fullness and immediacy of the present? What are we losing by commodifying as well as spacializing our time?
As our scientific cultures export their sense of dominance over other ways of seeing, we leave all but the intrepid few to fall in line and wonder what is wrong with them, rather than wondering what might be missing from the philosophical lens we are using. We are far less willing to be, without needing to do. Even our children rarely allow their feet to roam wherever they would take us, sauntering as Thoreau proscribed. How often do we, as a whole, sit in contemplation about existence or consciousness or character, as did the Greeks, Yogis, Taoists and others?
In Bergson and Einstein’s debate, Bergson took issue with reducing time to the quadrants on a clock face. While a representation of convenience, it did not account for what he referred to as “la durée” or duration,” the inner experience of time. We experience the past only when we reflect on it in the present, we reach into the future only when we reflect on it in the present. We measure time internally. Moments in love feel like they last forever, moments of fear drag with a weight of eternity. Moments of excitement rush by us like a speeding train. Moments before the death of a loved one pass too soon. While we can map those moments onto the tick of a second hand on a clockface, that measure does little to illuminate our experience of duration and all the subtlety, meaning, and difference we find therein.
As Berson writes in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889),
“When we look at the world externally, it seems as though events succeed one another in time as if they were strung on a line, each separate and distinct from the others. But the reality of time is quite different: it is the continuous flow of our inner life, in which the past, as it presses into the present, still retains its influence, and the future is already anticipated. Duration is not a homogeneous medium in which moments are juxtaposed like beads on a string; it is a qualitative multiplicity, a lived experience of time in which moments interpenetrate and flow into one another.”
Moments that interpenetrate and flow into one another. Moments that even seem to flow backwards. A continuous unfolding process, as indivisible as the current of a stream rushing down the mountainside. You cannot separate pieces of the current. It is an inherent whole, a movement, not a thing. It is a quality and yet more than a quality. It is music, rhythm, flow.
Such is our actual experience of time.
Even when time “stands still”–as if time were its own entity, with its own dimensionality and agency that could stand or sit or lie down–we still experience time as that indivisible current. It remains nonseparate from the events before and after.
In Matter and Memory (1910) Bergson elaborates,
“In duration, the past remains, prolonging itself into the present, which it pushes forward into the future. It is this ceaselessly moving process, not a series of static points or measurable moments, that constitutes real time. In the spatialized time of science, we see only a shadow or substitute for the deeper, lived reality of duration.”
Time, in our experience–yes, stop for a moment and look–does not feel like separate bits in order. Our experience or sense of time is of something we have a felt relationship with, that exerts an influence on us, somewhat like our heartbeat or the pull of gravity. Our lives are not sharp shards, tossed like broken pottery at the bottom of a well, which we attempt to meticulously piece together, always coming up with the ragged lines of separation and missing pieces.
We are in fact whole–one process of becoming that cannot be broken into self-arising independent pieces. Even the newborn came from earlier causes, her parents, their union, and all that brought them into being from the ancient star bursts that produced the oxygen that keeps them alive, to the miraculous evolutionary coding in the march of species evolution.
The echo and mark of the past is inherent in the present. The past can never truly “vanish” for the present would never be itself without the past. This way of understanding the wholeness of all things stands in rough contrast to the abstract and fragmented view of time measured in spatial terms. It also upends our linear and habitual relationship to time, which has been defined–or one might even say usurped–by the scientific method. Look closely at your own experience of time, that inner knowing of the process of aging, of memories being vivid in the present, of the prescience of things to come. We feel immediacy, each of the “stages” of time feel, in fact, non-separate from one another.
Though we seek, as a culture, to resolve the issue of time pressure, we seem to be getting no better at living a life in which there is plenty of time to live in all the wondrous dimensionality of existence. Since we try so hard and yet are getting no better at “managing” time, the question arises: Is there something fundamental about how we are relating to time that has divorced us from the experience of the infinite present and the recognition of an unbroken beingness which is the essence of the life force flung across the cosmos?
In our incessant–and futile–attempts to control time through greater and greater regimentation, we find a marketers’ dream, offering products to resolve a conundrum that is unresolvable within those parameters. And so it breeds an endless appetite for the next promise of a gadget or method or tool that will bring about the elusive reward of “free” time. Our attempts to squeeze our life into better and better controlled blocks of time only create further stress and anxiety. We will never be able to squeeze the experience of infinite Being into a finite slot. We will never be able to draw from the eternal well of Being from a limited piece of spatialized time.
Reducing time to a spatial quantity disconnects us from the unquenchable fountain of consciousness, from the unbroken continuum where the entirety of existence–all of the past and all of the latent or enfolded future–is contained. When we are divorced from that which gives us access to the profound connectedness or inseparability, we experience existential restlessness, inadequacy, or angst. No wonder we are so frightened and at odds with our daily reality.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson explains,
“What we call duration is the unfolding of an inner state that continually grows and matures, never remaining fixed. It is the self, living and changing, but always indivisibly one. This continuity of inner life cannot be reduced to clock time; it is a felt, experienced time, where past states are not gone but rather coexist with the present, giving it depth and meaning.”
And he expands, almost ten years later in Creative Evolution (1907),
“True duration is this interpenetration of the past and the present, this constant evolution of what we were, which prepares what we are about to become, in a movement where all is indivisible.”
So before rushing to add another fitbit to your arsenal of time-tracking devices, or blocking your meditation time into your calendar, bounded by tasks and obligations of a wholly different rhythm, let yourself reflect on time itself. Not on how well or poorly you “manage” it, what you are accomplishing with it, or what you think about the time you have spent alive and the time you have left. But rather sit and reflect on your inner experience of the immediacy of the present. On the fullness and richness of your inner sense of the moment. On the fragrance of the past wafting through the present, comingled. And the lure of the future drawing you forward along that dance and movement of unfolding.
When you emerge from your contemplation, reflect on your experience. Even if you felt time was short, was there just enough, in fact the perfect sense of time, of the present? Living in alignment with our felt sense of being may upend your habitual relationship to time. It may soothe the ripples of angst you feel, with a sense of being in the right place, at the right time, right now. It may resolve the momentum of fighting against the world as it is. And it may reveal a whole new orientation to yourself and your place in the miraculous evolutionary unfolding of the universe.
