All the time we need

A friend told me the story of an acquaintance who had hired a Navajo guide to take him by horseback to a remote part of the reservation. On the journey, the guide saw his client look at his watch and asked him, “What is the god on your wrist telling you to do?” The man was startled because what the guide said had an element of truth. The story is insightful because, like my friend’s acquaintance, we have become coupled to our clocks, watches, and calendars. Our society is fixated on time. We are continually reminded how precious time is. “Tempus fugit” and “Carpe diem” are not just sundial mottos but are reflected in myriad quotes, often trite, that have become the slogans of our society—from the old proverb “Time waits for no one” to “Time is money” from Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” They are watchwords of a nation of clock watchers.

Recently, I was looking through an old file of clippings and notes and came across a quote from the iconoclastic artist William T. Wiley that offers a different take on time: “I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you’ll need right up to the day you die.” Those words seem counterintuitive and even a sacrilege in our society when there never seems to be enough time, when it is revered as a commodity as precious as gold, when killing it is considered something akin to murder.

I, too, have long been caught up in the idea needing to allocate my time wisely. Now in my mid-70s, I increasingly feel the effects of the years I have accumulated. My running pace keeps slowing and hills grow steeper. It is often a challenge to get out of bed or stand up from a low chair. Driving at night is more difficult. I don’t always catch someone’s words right away. Strangers call me “Sir.” Time seems to be compressing, passing more quickly. When I was younger it felt like Christmas would never come and school terms were interminable. These days, months rush past the way calendar pages flip in old movies, and years are beginning to do the same. I often write in my journal that there is not a moment to be lost. Even though I am retired, my days are filled with all sorts of meetings, and my to-do list never seems to get any shorter. I feel that there is not enough time to do all of the things I want to do.

Wiley’s words, however, make me wonder if I have the wrong attitude toward time, if it is he who is correct and I the one in the hamster cage. When he says “you have all the time you’ll need” perhaps he means that the real issue is not one of a shortage of time but rather an inability to understand what one really “needs” to do, to understand what is important.

The act of determining what we “need” relates at how we engage the world. People often say they don’t have enough time for something, say to go to a PTA meeting, exercise at the gym, do laundry, or visit an elderly friend. Yet, they have time to watch television, surf the internet, play golf, etc. There is a difference between needs and wants, between what we really need and what we think we need.

We all have needs ranging from basic necessities for survival and security, to psychological needs such as connection with others, sense of purpose, and feeling of fulfillment. What creates the confusion between wants and needs, I think, is that we live in a society in which we are inundated with beguiling advertising and social pressure that cause us to confuse what we might want with what we really need. We have become fixated on getting and spending in a mad race toward what we have come to believe is success, popularity, beauty, power, freedom, etc.—all of the nouns that seduce us and distract us from simply living.

There is another aspect to understanding what “need” means. Some people try to fit more of their “needs” into available time by juggling several different things simultaneously, what is generally called multitasking. Multitasking in of itself is not bad. For example, cooking a meal might involve related tasks such as sautéing veggies while making a salad.  The darker side of multitasking, called switch tasking by psychologists, is dividing one’s attention among unrelated tasks, e.g., trying to cook dinner while writing a letter to the editor. Research has shown that that sort of thing often does not work—the veggies become scorched, and letter to the editor doesn’t make sense.

It is easy to understand why switch tasking doesn’t work well. We have only one brain and only a fixed amount of attention. Dividing it between different mental tasks means that some or all don’t receive our full attention, and the result is predictable—the frustration of trying to talk with someone who is looking at his or her cell phone or people driving erratically due to being distracted by adjusting the radio, texting, eating, looking at a map, etc.

Once again, Thoreau gets at the essence of the matter: “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?….It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”

The answer to that question is the key to having all the time we need.