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Saving Time
The body is our first clock. Each biological process has its own time-table. The heart beats at its own pace, the lungs fill with air. It takes so long to digest a banana, for a sleep cycle to run its course. The Sun marks out a day, the moon a month, and if we are paying attention maybe we see the years pass in the stars. Until quite recently (a century or 2 ago that is) this natural clockwork shaped our day; work from dawn until dusk. The seasons shaped the work year- plant in the spring, harvest in the fall. Some seasons are safer for travel, others were best for staying close to home and weaving cloth. During a visit to Guatemala, a few of us went to help out on the town's organic farm. We got up at the usual time, ate breakfast, had a brief orientation with the town priest, and walked off to work. After spending about an hour turning the earth, one of the local farmers, who had been sitting in the shade came over to ask "why do you work in the mid-day sun? It's too hot to work!" The farmers had gotten up and turned the rest of the garden while the Americans were still in bed.
How did we get so far away from the rhythms of the earth's clock? Sociologist Juliet Schor claims that it was the textile factories in 14th century Europe that brought the mechanical clock into the lives of humans. Because these early workers were used to working by the sun, the factory clock would chime to bring people to work, to send them to lunch and back, and to release them at the end of the day. In so doing, the factory owners could extend the work day beyond what was natural. Time became a commodity. Something to spend, something to waste. Profit and progress had something to do with working faster and longer. And soon we needed PDAs and schedule books to manage the volume and complexity of not only our work, but our rest, our recreation, and our worship as well. We live in a very particular moment in time when the parents of Palo Alto 10 year olds lament how over scheduled their children are.
Despite the record number of time saving devices available to us today, Schor calculates that the only time in history with longer work hours than we face today was during the 19th Century Industrial Revolution famous for it's 70-80 hour work weeks . She makes very convincing arguments that as an agrarian people, periods of work were broken up with far larger periods of rest than we now experience. Labor Unions won the 40 hour week in the 1850s, but these gains have eroded since World War II. Once again many workers again find themselves facing 70-80 hour weeks. If the fax machine and the microwave aren't going to save our time, we are going to have to find another way.
First, let us face the reality that our time is finite. I think much of our hyper-activity comes in denial of this simple fact. No matter how many meetings, soccer games, ski weekends, worship services and overtime hours we cram into our days, we will leave this world with things un-done. This fact is not new in our century, however. Generations before ours have faced their own mortality without the frantic scheduling which characterizes our culture. We seem to believe that not only can we have it all, but we should have it all right now, all at once. Physicists agree that time is merely a construct that keeps everything from happening all at once. Strains of Hinduism and Buddhism and the mystical strains of other traditions also support the idea that time is an illusion that allows existence, which veils the primal oneness of all things. The sequential, finite way we experience time assists us in processing our experience, and in fact allows our existence as individual beings. By definition, lived time is finite. This can feel constraining. The grid of the calendar can feel like prison bars. But what is going to liberate any of us from that jail is not efficiency or defying common sense about how many things we can do.
One way we liberate ourselves is by reclaiming the depth available in each moment. This requires making choices. From time to time I recognize that I am never going to read the mounting pile of extremely relevant professional publications stacked precariously at one end of my desk. From that realization I choose 1 or 2 to read with my sandwich over lunch, and let go of the rest. And I do feel liberated as the remaining stack drops from my own expectations like an anchor into the sea. And I sink down into my reading, I give it my full attention, the time and space it needs to enter my life in a way far deeper than if I gave it the kind of space reserved for "the 1st in a stack of 200". We choose either a juggling act, where we touch each ball only long enough to keep it in the air, or the knowing of holding one object in the palm. I imagine that a century ago people sought out their ministers to be absolved from lascivious thoughts or dishonest words. Today people come on occasion to say "my mother's in the hospital, and I just can't lead my boy scout troop any more" And so by whatever authority my ordination and installation give me in this congregation I say unto you: it's okay to do 1 thing at a time. It's okay to serve on only 1 committee. It's okay to put a building project on hold while we search for a new parish minister.
I saw flashing lights behind me the other day as I left work to pick up my son at daycare. The policeman asked "where are you going in such a hurry?'' Unimpressed with my answer he wrote me a ticket for driving too fast in a residential neighborhood. Before I restarted my car I sat for a moment. I don't like to go this fast, I thought. Moreover it's against the law to go this fast. What if I understood this ticket as a wakeup call, and just slowed down. The next time your child is yelling for milk while dinner needs stirring on the stove and the phone rings announcing that call you are expecting from work you may laugh at the naiveté of what I am telling you today. Or you could turn off the stove and let the machine get the call. You can take a moment to breathe before you fill a sippy cup with milk. The world is moving too fast for its own health. It's okay to make choices. It's okay to focus deeply on the one thing that is most important to you in this moment, and let the rest of the world zoom by.
So time can be experienced as deep. Even in our finite lives, it is also long. Some time ago, I glanced around my house from object to object- the stuffed animal my mom gave me that Easter when I was 15, the book I read in my liberation theology class, a candle I made one winter evening. Every object in the house represented at least one moment, perhaps a sequence of moments, or for the well worn objects, thousands of moments over a course of years. My life so far has been an incredibly vast collection of moments, and I have only lived for 30 some years. When I turn to the future and realize that that god willing I have 30 years in the ministry ahead of me, I begin to relax and settle into my life. The work I do in this congregation doesn't have to be complete in a semester. Together we can plant seeds or build programs or buildings that may take 3 or 5 or even 10 years to come to fruition. And when each of us leaves this church, through death or wanderlust or change of life circumstances, we have made sure there will be new hands to tend the saplings and grow a sustainable community for generations to follow. For me this makes the future feel spacious. Big enough for me and for dreams that will outlive me.
Buddhist teacher Johanna Macy theorizes that our mad dash to do it all now is in some way related to a conscious or unconscious belief that we are living in end times. Since we realized that we have the capacity to destroy all life on this planet, we have lost our connection to the future. Why plant a tree that will take 100 years to reach maturity, why spend decades building a cathedral like the great cathedrals of Europe. How can I take seriously the idea that I will leave a legacy for 7 generations if I know even at an unconscious level that not only my life but all human life may be extinguished in our time. This loop feeds back on itself as our sense of disconnection with the future leads us to act in ways that jeopardize it. Tyrone Cashman, who helped write the laws that put the Altamont Windmills on the power grid, writes that "this spilling out unto the future [is] the entire essence of organisms… This wired-in relationship to time is alterable only at the price of extinction. Of course this time-thrust, this into-the-future-ness of all living beings can be lost by a species. But then, immediately, the species itself disappears, forever. " The imperative that we reconnect ourselves to the cycles of life, extends beyond the personal into the web of being. We need to regain our sense that we are one generation that follows thousands and will be followed by thousands more.
There are many astrophysicists who believe that before the big bang and the initial expansion of the universe, another universe might have been. And if our universe contracts back into that original oneness, another universe may yet be. Brahma opens his eyes and a world comes into being. Brahma closes his eyes, and the world goes out of being. The earth wakes in the spring and sleeps in the fall as she has done a million times over. Time is long.
Imagine time as a page from your date book. We find the depth of time when we bring all our attention to one white space between the lines. Time is long when we set page next to page in a timeline which runs as far as the eye can see in both directions. Can you also imagine stepping away from the grid altogether, until those hatch marks become smaller than the stitching on a football, like the grid of farms and cities as an airplane recedes in the sky. Both time management expert Stephen Covey and Tibetan Buddhist Master Tarthang Tulku agree that time as it is measured and separated into events is too small. Efficiency and even achieving our goals can make time smaller instead of larger. Tulku points out that what we think of as time are only measurements of something else. Neither the clock nor the calendar equal time, they are only measurements of time. Even the language we use to talk about time-- words like long or short-- are only metaphors borrowed from space. Just as "a finger pointing at the moon is not he moon" and a painting of a hat is not a hat, an hour is a measurement, a concept and is not equal to time itself. Lived time is finite. Time itself is infinite. Tulku writes "Existence itself depends on 'time', and necessarily partakes of the derivative past-present-future structure and also of transitoriness… We have become so conditioned by this trend that all our hopes and aspirations amount to filling up little slots in a sort of personalized past-present-future grid. We are literally timing ourselves away… we have little capacity for opening to the infinity that 'time' really offers and communicates. " To complete our hopelessly spatial metaphor, we could think of this as time being wide, that it expands beyond the grid we are used to identifying with time.
Time may be the grid which measures and bounders our lives, but it is also the field in which experience plays. It is the finite time of living, but also something deeper or "greater" than lived time. Our minds cling instead to the clock, the passage of minutes, deadlines, or the factory bell. We observe a Sabbath or worship in community in part to reframe time, to allow a different experience of time outside of time. We remember what is most deeply important to our selves, and to our world. We pause to remember that time is wider, longer, and deeper that we usually allow ourselves to experience. We gather to loosen our grasp on the seconds that tick by, and rest into the natural flow of being, rest into the knowing that there is enough time both for your unique and precious life, but also for the generations that will follow, for universe after universe expanding and contracting like the breath of being itself.
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Darcey Laine
Reverend Darcey Laine
April 13, 2003
Palo Alto, CA
When a child is born, every experience she has is new. Her first breath of air, her first time to nurse, to bathe, to sleep. Even as an adult, when I experience an intensity of newness, it tires me out. It is repetition, routine, and experience that make things go smoothly, and conserve our energy. But to a newborn each moment in the world is an untried path. Perhaps this is why they sleep every 2 hours. This tiny cycle of sleep, nurse, burp, diaper, gaze at the world for a moment and sleep again creates a 2 hour day. With each passing of the cycle the newborn becomes more familiar with the most basic elements of life and over time the routine becomes a groove that he child can rest into and build on, as he comes to know his world. For a new parent, used to the luxurious pace of a 24 hour day, this transition can be excruciating. The natural rhythms of an adult body are interrupted relentlessly. Much of parenting a newborn I believe is an ongoing negotiation as these 2 dissonant biological rhythms come into harmony with one another.
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