What If We Gave In To Time?

Because it isn't giving in to us, try as we might.

All my life, I’ve been a person who runs late. Fashionably late, as I like to think of it, because that feels better than labeling myself as a late person.

I don’t like it. It’s stressful and it leaves me in a frenzy, usually on a daily basis.

So then why do I do it? Where does this characteristic stem from? 

When I thought about this a while back in the context of a coaching meeting, I realized that I usually run late because I am always trying to do more. I know I’m within the window of when I need to leave, yet I try to check one more thing off my list. Or I set unrealistic expectations for all that I can accomplish in a timeframe, often not accounting for the time it takes to quite literally get out the door and transition from one thing to the next.

By fitting in one more thing before I leave the house for an appointment, I am trying to maximize the time I have. Because being early for said appointment with minutes to spare, minutes in which I am idly waiting, isn’t acceptable. “You could have done something with those minutes!” the little capitalist devil on my shoulder whispers into my ear.

The pressure to do more in less time is one I'm sure you’re no stranger to, because it is the lifeblood of the society we live in today. Time is our most valuable resource, yet it is one that we cannot get more of, no matter how hard we, or the Daily Harvests and Wazes of the world try. Yet our capitalist system rewards this very effort, having turned time into a commodity. 

While this influence isn't new by any means, it takes a conscious effort to notice how and when it shows up in our daily lives. I began thinking about this more upon reading Jia Tolentino’s powerful essay, “Always Be Optimizing.”¹ The pressure to optimize one’s time is prevalent in so many of the things we do, buy, and consume that it takes conscious effort to untangle it.

Recipes are titled or categorized by the amount of time it takes to make them, so you can “get dinner on the table in less than 20 minutes!” (Never mind the amount of prep work that these time blocks often don't account for.)

Online publications, Substack included, often label their articles with a reading estimate indicated in minutes, so you can use time as a filter for what you consume, rather than the topic of the content itself. (It’s interesting that feature-length films have increased in their average duration, while digital mediums continuously optimize for the opposite. Imagine going to the movie theater and, instead of buying a ticket based on the film’s name, you choose based solely on the length.)

Workout videos are curated by their duration too, often within 5 minute increments, so you can get your exercise done in 10, 15, or 25 minutes depending on the block of time you have available that day. The pandemic exacerbated this one in particular for me—before 2020, it was normal for me to allocate an hour and a half to a workout class, including round trip travel time. Nowadays, if an at home workout video is longer than 30 minutes, I’m uninterested.

I think this is partially due to attention span, and partially due to the pressure to maximize our time. “Why dedicate 90 minutes to an exercise routine when you can be just as effective in 20?” our capitalist lore posits. 

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Upon getting home from a run yesterday, my boyfriend proclaimed he was going to do a yoga video and asked if I want to join him. My first reaction was to ask, “how long is it?” When his answer was 30 minutes, my initial instinct was to rule it out as “too long.”

But then I stopped myself, considering this for a moment as I realized the very act of limiting myself to 20 minutes or less was succumbing to this very concept of optimization as he and I had discussed weeks earlier. 

If I did this video, it would mean less time to get things done before my girlfriends came over for a movie night, which included drafting this post. But what was there to gain from it? I had never done yoga with Pete before so I found that idea fun, plus I knew it would be beneficial for my body’s sake to do some kind of stretching post-run. Would a 20-minute versus 30-minute video really have made a difference in this situation? No, it was choosing whether to do a yoga video at all. I ultimately chose to do so.

As we chaturanga-ed and downward-dogged on our mats together, I found the time to pass more quickly than I had expected it to. I was aware of time in the sense that I wondered once or twice how much of the workout had surpassed; but eventually I gave up control of that and just tried to focus on the movements and my breath. It dawned on me that this was my first true yoga session since working through a wrist sprain a couple months ago. And my wrist wasn’t bothering me! That in and of itself was a victory. 

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The thing about time is, no matter how much we’re pressured to optimize it, we cannot change it. Time has its own bounds and will behave as such, and there’s an inherent beauty in that.

Last night I finally watched The Idea of You. I’d been itching to watch it since I read the book years ago. Something I noticed throughout the movie was the symbolism of the main character Hayes’ watch. I can’t remember if this detail was in the book, but essentially, Solène (Anne Hathaway’s character) is seen wearing her beau’s watch on several occasions as a result of them exchanging it back and forth. It happened so many times that by the end I was thinking about how the watch quite literally tracks the passage of time, and the difference in time, i.e. the 16 year age gap between them, is what is keeping them apart. I don’t know if the movie producers intended this symbolism since a woman wearing a man’s watch isn’t a new romantic gesture, but I like thinking of it as such. It makes the whole thing a bit more poetic.

On the topic of watches, I’m reminded of another time-related anecdote from my retreat last summer. One of the women in attendance, an art teacher from Arizona, happened to have a box full of broken antique wristwatches in her trunk. She set them out one morning, leaving a note that simply said they’re broken, take one if you wish.

It was fitting because a key theme of the retreat had become the concept of time. How it is a limiter, and how it can magically expand in times when you need it to the most. Our facilitator

Satya Doyle Byock

had mentioned to us the concept of mythic time, which I had never heard of before. Mythic time is “the time that exists during the myths, a non-linear, non-specific period of time during which those events occurred.”²

At one point shortly after this reflection, one of the women mistakenly recalled mythic time as “mystic time” so our group began lovingly referring to our time on the island as “mystic time” from then on. When the antique watches that had stopped telling time appeared the next morning, it was a beautiful nod to this sentiment. They became gifts that we could take home with us, symbols of the experience we all shared together.

I’m ashamed to admit that I hesitated to take one at first. My rational brain didn’t see the point of taking a watch that didn’t tell the time, if I didn’t intend to get it fixed. But later that afternoon I returned to the table when I realized that perhaps for me, that was precisely the point. The broken watch symbolized that there didn't need to be a point. It was a reminder that time doesn’t always have to be linear and it’s ok to let oneself be lost.

Imagine a world that isn’t dictated by time. What might that free you from?

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✍️ Author’s Note:

I originally intended to write an essay about how we optimize ourselves, but it became clear as I wrote that optimizing time is what I was really thinking about.

Recognizing and relieving the “time pressure” I put on myself is something I am constantly working on. It’s really hard. Even with writing this newsletter, I let the pressure of time consume me. I'm spending too long, I should be able to do it faster, should I be doing something else with my time? It takes conscious effort to recognize these thoughts, hear them, and then set them aside. I found Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks to be an excellent resource in this regard, and one I intend to reread.

• ⏰ How do you feel the pressure of time? 

• ⏳ When does time feel magically expansive for you?
  

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1. This essay appears in her book Trick Mirror, but I found an abbreviated version of it here.

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/heathenry/comments/bs5evr/can_someone_explain_how_mythic_time_works_please/