It's about Time.
If The Plague taught us anything, it was the value of time.
I recently encountered a clever demonstration of time’s passage.1 Simply assign 50 years to a human lifespan. A measure of time in people, not years, shortens the apparent distance to the past.
Now the United States was founded 5 people ago. Christ lived 40 people ago. The Pyramids were built 90 people ago. Fire was discovered 20,000 people ago.
Time flies. Our past is literally just behind us. Our past is far more recent than we realize. Our past is far more relevant in making us who we are than we realize.2
Sadly, that is only the speed of time viewed at the macro level, across lives. I say sadly, because mortality. At the micro level, within a life, time moves just as quickly, if not faster.
The writer Tim Urban made this point dramatically years ago on his blog, Wait But Why. Assume a lifespan of 90 years per human, a generous but not unrealistic assumption. Now you have 90 rows. Give space to 52 weeks per year. Now you have 52 columns. Plotting major life events and periods of time becomes easier, but the speed of the passage of time is made manifest.3
Just checking off time shows my life to be almost two thirds over.
It’s even worse than that, however:4
If you are a parent, time with your children peaks in your 30s and sharply declines thereafter.
If you are a child, time with your parents and siblings peaks before you are 20 and sharply declines thereafter.
Less time with family and friends means more time alone as one grows old.
Stop, you’re killing me.
Yes I know, this is really cheery stuff here. Nonetheless the fact remains that life is precious, and short. Time flies, across lives and within life. We have only so much time, and that allotment will be gone soon enough. Even for the religious, this is an uncomfortable fact. Indeed, it is THE fact.
It is a fact which gives us our existence. We may decry this limit. However, limits are what define things. In order to “be,” we must have a beginning and an end.
Consider God. One definition of God is that God is everything. To be everything is to exist without limit. Hence God is no “thing.” Lacking limits to define what is God, we can nonetheless say such limits exist in our case and give us definition. We are a thing.5
That is a very obtuse way of saying we should be happy to be alive. I have been called worse.
Great, we’re alive, now what?
What would depend on each individual.
How to live life? Now, here we have some breadcrumbs.
These breadcrumbs have been left for us by our fellow…travelers seems to be a word that works here. Lifers makes us sound like prison inmates, a distasteful metaphor. Livers sounds like a protein source most people hate (unless cooked with onions and a little sugar; Kurt’s Steakhouse in Delafield, Wisconsin, used to have the best).
Travelers leave paths. In walking those paths we widen those that get us to where we want to go. Those path that do not get us to where we want to go get used less, become narrower, and soon become overgrown with reality.6
Breadcrumbs?
We are social creatures.7 Given the facts listed earlier, it makes sense to embrace the time you have with your children, prioritize time with your family and friends, and find joy in solitude. It sounds so simple as to border on the banal, but it is still true. Those are basic yet pretty good how-to-live-life answers for us social creatures.
Doing so would provide memories. It would seem that while one IS alive, being able to enjoy those memories would also be a good idea.
So Reflection adds value to life.
One way to reflect is to journal.8 If one is amenable, a regularly kept journal has several benefits, the greater the frequency the better. Practice makes perfect, and what we’re practicing at here is life.
Reflection through journaling takes the normal action that is life and turns it into a book report. This takes the normal fuzz of life and puts it into focus. By giving life greater detail of focus, time is spent paying attention to that detail. Writing is formalized thinking, and cuts deeper memory grooves. This is exercise and mind-strengthening. This is a reason I write.
Thus the pace of life appears to slow as we reflect, and we build memories.9
There is another way to slow the passage of time.
One simply goes with a flow.10
Flow is a name given to a specific mental state. Flow is also known as “being in the zone.” The Czech psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi11 defined Flow as
being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.12
There are 6 factors encompassing a flow experience:13
Intense and focused concentration on the present moment,
Merging of action and awareness,
A loss of reflective self-consciousness,
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity,
A distortion of temporal experience, as one's subjective experience of time is altered, and
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience.
Flow theory postulates that three conditions must be met to achieve flow:14
The activity must have clear goals and progress.
The activity must provide clear and immediate feedback.
Balance is required between the challenge of the activity and one’s skills.
We may conclude from the above that flow comes from activities that are enjoyable, not pleasurable. Both pleasure and enjoyment make one feel good, but there are differences. One difference between pleasure and enjoyment can be viewed in terms of time. Pleasure satisfies immediate needs like food or sex. Enjoyment involves activities we want to engage in again in the future. There are other dimensions to the difference as well; any animal may experience pleasure, but enjoyment takes forethought and effort.15
In other words, flow takes work.
So, find something that you value for its own reward, that you find has intrinsic value. It can be anything, but it has to involve effort, and getting better over time.
Please note the implications. Any activity will do.
My friend Jeff lives in a quiet small Wisconsin town east of Madison. From the front of his house one would see nothing of great interest. Journey to the back yard, however, and one is transformed as if walking through the wardrobe into the realm of Aslan. Jeff enjoys landscaping. I mean, Jeff really enjoys landscaping. The deck from the second level to the ground floor is multi-tiered, with a set of hills beneath the descending stairs and a small bridge with waterfall. None of this is tacky, as one would see at a garden store simply to showcase what was available. Everything works, and it works because of the concentrated effort put forth over time.
Where Jeff goes for a utilitarian yet free-wheeling party focus to his landscaping ideas, my other friend James is slowly creating an English-style country garden somewhere outside of Beloit. The English Cotswolds or Lake District have nothing on the charm of his backyard. Croquet, anyone?
And then there is my wife, Jane. Costume Design is her passion, and for over a decade she realized her art with the Lakeland Union High School Theatre Department. A few years back they did Cinderella, and Jane and her team went for William Ivey Long’s transformational gowns….and pulled it off. She tells me she has no memory of the passage of time while working on these dresses.
For my part, I am beginning to lose myself in my reading and writing, but if I really want to make time stop, nothing can compete with the flow of playing Bach Minuet #1 in G Major on classical guitar. It doesn’t matter I can’t play like a master, I need only be better than myself yesterday. Besides, my wife’s first child had a musical teething ring that played this tune, so my playing stops time for me and transports my wife to a happy place. That’s a good day, Tater.
Flow, indeed.
Setting goals is good because it gives one something to work for. Work is good because it helps accomplish goals. Work is also good because in any activity to which we give intrinsic value, flow is possible. You might even make someone smile.
We may not have much time on Earth, but within a flow state we can slow the passage of time, albeit temporarily, as if we were near the event horizon of a black hole.
So, how do we live life?
We embrace the time we have with children, prioritize time with family and friends, and find joy in solitude.
We take time to reflect.
We find work with intrinsic value and in striving for a goal we live peak life experience by losing ourselves in action, becoming life itself.
You’re pretty long-winded. Can you just be quick about it and summarize?
Be social and enjoy solitude.
Reflect.
Go with a flow.
Why?
It’s about Time.
My kingdom for a memory, I cannot remember the source.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.