“Your time or your life!” (—Jean-Louis Servan Schreiber, in “The Art of Time.” Marlowe & Company, New York City 2000, 162 pages)
The opening line of this readable little book cuts immediately to its core message. Forget all other concepts: physical, astrophysical, cosmic, whatever. The only useful way to think of time is as the span of your life. Anything else is false dichotomy. The author delivers this in the 3-page introduction. If you read no further but grasp this idea, you’ll get your money’s worth many times over.
Servan-Schreiber had two reasons for writing the book. The first was simply to deliver the above message. That done, he describes how we can develop a healthier relationship with time than what most of us are living now. Much of the work is spent putting our current perspectives into context. But towards the end, he offers constructive and valuable guidance to a healthier and less stressful approach.
A surprisingly gratifying element of the book, presented as a backdrop, is a brief cultural history explaining how we’ve come to think of time today. We’ve gone from primitive societies that lived by daily and seasonal rhythms, to medieval villagers timing their days by church bells; from church bells to synchronized railroad time across villages, and on to the rigidly controlled hours of the mills and factories at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Finally, we come to digital watches and the modern office that parse our days into soulless pieces we pencil into schedulers. The outcome, he says, is all too familiar: stressful days, too-short vacations, frustration and anxiety, and lack of fulfillment.
Hearing all this, while disconcerting, is also validating. We all have sensed, as we’ve struggled with the competing demands of modern life, that the insanity of our days cannot be natural. But learning how we got here creates perspective. We can at least see where went off the rails. We’ve been socialized since birth to conform to unnatural temporal frameworks, and we sabotage what personal time we have with overwork, overcommitment, overconsumption and generally poor choices.
It is on this latter point that Servan-Schreiber implicitly distinguishes himself from the ubiquitous time management strategists marketing to the business crowd these days. Their works too often begin and end with setting priorities and mastering a task list. Our author instead offers a philosophy. His departure lies in the distinction between what he calls “social time” and “experienced time.” Social time — the time of calendars and clocks and meetings and social obligations — is the purview of the business books. Our author guides you past that trap and instead simply shows you your goal, the more natural realm of experienced time. In this realm, also called “perceived” time, we do not measure time so much as we feel, or sense it. We think of it less as segmented pieces and more as the measure of our days.
Experienced time is what passes when we are fully immersed in a task, or in our work in general, or in life. Clocks become our tools rather than our masters. Schedulers and task lists merely provide a framework to meet our obligations. Interestingly, all this brought to mind a passage from Catholic philosopher Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, read 40 years ago. The title I forget, but not the thought: Paraphrased, it is that the measure of one’s happiness is in how little he or she perceives the passing of time. The current work has offered an affirming convergence.
Servan-Schreiber doesn’t suggest a return to medieval rhythms. But his implicit argument is that we can achieve a productive and responsible, yet comfortable and relaxed harmony with our days. Over a few scant pages, he describes his own own history and solution. But, again departing from the business books, he leaves it to you to find your own way. He does, however, offer guideposts and an implicit warning: There are both personal and social obstacles to taking control of your time. Succeeding requires self-knowledge, self-discipline and self-interest; also motivation, will, and perseverance.
Your goal is to internalize your relationship with time to the point that you act on your days, not react to them. Think of your day as a room of fixed size, 24 hours. Will you furnish it thoughtlessly, fill it with clutter, cover the floor with debris? Or will you keep it open and breathable, with simple furniture, favorite art, a few keepsakes? This room is your life, and how you furnish it determines how comfortably you live in it.
Servan-Schreiber prefers the thoughtful room. He notes in closing that a life lived at peace with time is, in a sense, a work of art. Such a well-lived life exhibits the same elements that ancient Greeks found in art: a sense of order and equilibrium and unity, enough contrast to make it stimulating, and a cohesive harmony that imparts inner peace to the viewer.
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DAYS
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great philosopher of time in the 20th Century was Martin Heidegger whose abiding preoccupation was the meaning of Being, an issue for which we have lost all sensitivity in his view. He is convinced that human experience is irreducibly temporal, suffused through and through with incessantly shifting themes of past, present and future. We cannot help but employ temporal categories to virtually everything in our purview, and so being is inevitably defined by time—temporality is a precondition of all our experience.
This is an excellent review, Bob, thoughtful, informative, articulate and appreciative. Servan-Screiber’s philosophy appears to be that of Heidegger minus the formidable technical neologisms that Heidegger employs. I frequently call to mind a quotation from the Scandinavian writer, Peter Zappfe, to remind me of experienced (phenomenological) Time: “We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay awhile in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.” If this thought were widely assimilated, intellectually and emotionally, it would elevate mankind far above its present benighted condition. People would pursue their lives with a seriousness that is personally existential rather than socially imitative.
When I was in the Peace Corps, back in the late 70’s, I had the rare privilege of having a job that no one much cared whether or not I performed. I also had my own apartment, stocked with books and a guitar and a kitchen and a manual typewriter, no telephone or other electronic distractions. I unconsciously drifted into passing some days during which I never, not once, looked at a clock. I awoke when I was no longer sleepy, drank coffee until I was done, switched to alcohol when I felt like it, ate when I was hungry, dozed if I was sleepy, went back to bed in the night when I was ready. All completely in sync with my body rhythms. I’m convinced that anyone who does that a few times can never leave it behind…it’s addictive. When I began working for real, I continued trying to do it, albeit it more consciously. Now I’m retired, I do it often, at least in some form. They are the most peaceful of days…and the experience has destroyed my interest in schedules and my ability to meet them. Ideally, our goal should be to live our entire lives like that. But I confess to a certain inability (at least to this point in my growth) to bring it to its logical conclusion. At life’s close, I should be able to go to my death with the same peaceful satisfaction as I approach my bed at the end of such days. Right now, I can’t say that I could do that.
I am pretty calm about the prospect of annihilation now after having suffered for decades from rather severe death anxiety. I remember nothing before 1948 and that prior non-existence bothers me not at all. Exactly why is my virtually guaranteed non-existence after life so bothersome? Exactly why are our attitudes asymmetrical?