Mostly we keep the persistent drumbeat
of time at bay by orchestrating over it a symphony of frenetic activity. Strange
to say, it is those ordinary moments when we lose control of our daily
timetables that our life-in-time becomes most present to us. When we wait on a
busy street for an overdue bus, or become trapped in a lengthy meeting which is
badly managed, we are pulled unwillingly out of our forgetfulness about the
value and meaning of time. And we have our lack of control over time thrust in
our faces – our inability to summon the bus, or to know why it is late is just
a refraction to us in a particular moment of our inability to reconcile
ourselves to time.
Let me take you to that interminable
work meeting. What kind of experience is it? As a member of the meeting you
instantly recognize that the agenda is dominated by administrivia that is inaccessible
except to those who have specialist knowledge and interest. The interjections
of some individuals are liable to derail the process and lengthen the session to
no productive end. Issues that have been discussed for years keep re-emerging.
You know as a relatively junior member of the team that your opinion isn’t
really wanted in any case.
And so, there you are, as the clock
ticks ever on. The feelings you experience are by turns frustration, anxiety, disappointment
and regret. You mull over the things you could be doing with the time – the lost
opportunities for making progress on your projects, the deadlines that you have
looming, even the chance to perhaps go home a little early and play with your children.
You doodle on your notepad. You check your emails and compose responses – which
is a small redemption of the time at least. You poke someone on Facebook.
Inwardly, though, you are dying. You
are transfixed by a kind of social norm which says that it is rude simply to
walk out without a reasonable excuse. The meeting ticks around into its third hour,
and you start to become physically uncomfortable. Long ago, you lost the thread
of the meeting, and you feebly assent to whatever proposals are put forward
without really caring, even though these will have an impact your workplace.
You have ascended to that plane where you simply don’t care anymore. What you are aware of is the time that is passing
– and it is agonizing to watch.
Why does it feel this way? These time
traps are certainly features of contemporary life, where we can point to the
plethora of alternative options in any given moment as to how we could make use
of the time. At every point, we could be doing what we are doing or something else. It is infuriating to
lose that choice. A more simple lifestyle would not have the options, but would
not have the lobster pots of time into which we seem to crawl so often either:
the computer malfunction, the traffic snafu, the cancelled flight.
But it isn’t simply the loss of
options. It’s the loss of control, on the one hand; and the reminder that our
time is finite, on the other: these things make the experience of the time-trap
so unbearable. There doesn’t seem to be a purpose to the time being spent, and
yet time isn’t pausing for us while we discover one. It simply goes.
Our consciousness of time’s passing in
one of the things that makes us human – for we are able to lock the past in language
like a bug in amber, and we are able to give voice to our dreams. We are aware
of the past and the present in ways that we find it hard to imagine that the other
creatures are. A tree keeps a count of the years in its trunk, but is not aware
of its own age. It is impossible to think of a dog caring whether you forgot
its birthday or not, even though we pet-owners like to throw them presents and
sing to them (or is that just me?).
But at the same time as we can be
conscious of the past and the future because we can talk about them, we also
find them tantalizingly out of reach. There is always an argument about the
past of our experience, because all we have is our experience of it – which may
turn out to be mistaken. A friend of mine came home to visit his parents one
day when he was in his twenties only to have his mother announce that she had
been having an affair with a family friend for more than a decade, and was now
moving out with him. The trauma this caused him was not least because the
memories he had of happy family holidays with this family friend where no
longer what they had seemed to be at the time. His experience in the first
place was a faulty or incomplete experience of what had in fact occurred – and now,
knowing the truth, he could not possess that memory as it once had been. This
was an unusual experience, it has to be said. But the possibility that
something like this could occur puts a question mark against our precious relationship
to the past.
Furthermore, it is not a surprise to
say that we can’t change the past however much we would like to. We can perhaps
change the historical record, or tell untruths about the past. But we know that
can’t change it really: what has happened lies sealed in the road behind us.
The past is completely unforgiving about our regrets and mistakes.
The future is out of reach in a
different way. It is this way simply because of what we all know: that it is
unknown. What we do know from our experience of the world is this: that there
are forces in the world and in human society that are simply greater than we
are, and which we cannot predict, or that it is useless to predict. We are
simply unaware, other than as a possibility, of what drunk driver will meet us
on the road, or what tumour will grow in our bodies, or what the economy will
do to our livelihoods, or what declaration of war will completely alter the
fabric of our daily lives. The most prepared we can be is to be prepared for
the unpredictable.
No comments:
Post a Comment