Finishing a book I meant to read 20+ years ago

This summer, after moving in the spring, I was placing books on my bookshelf, and I came across a book I bought in graduate school. It was a book on time. When I bought it, I was too busy to finish it.

Now, in 2017, in the summer, I slipped this thin book off the shelf, and I actually finished it. And it has changed everything. Too big a claim? Maybe . . . not. The book, The Art of Time, by Frenchman Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, does not approach time from an American perspective, breaking time down, how to get more done in time. Instead, it investigates time and our relationship to time. Two of the points he made occur to me many times a day. First, that we speak of distance in terms of time — “How far is the beach?” “Oh, about 20 minutes without traffic.” — but we do not reverse that. I think many of us, or maybe just me, think of time as one of those stretchable plastic garbage bags. They fascinate me. Just keep squishing stuff in, and the bag keeps bulging, and if you’ve spent enough on them, they rarely break. They are unwieldy, can’t be picked up easily, and sometimes the cinch can break through the plastic at the top, but the bag stretches.

The metaphor aptly describes my life last semester. I kept forcing stuff in, and while the cinch, aka me, “ripped,” — colds that would not end, laryngitis, work returned too late — I entered the summer thinking that if I just could figure out the right way to organize my time, I would have the fall wired.

Now, post-The Art of Time, I have an emerging understanding about myself and time. In response to the idea of time as distance or volume, Servan-Schreiber suggests that we think of time as a room with fixed dimensions. Those dimensions can and will never change. The question is what we put in the room, how we arrange it, and how we navigate or cross it. The Glad bag analogy for time does not work because it is a false analogy. Our lives become unmanageable because literally we have too much in them to cross them. At the end of the day, we lay exhausted somewhere in the room of time, sprawled across a box or a chair or something we thought we could negotiate, but we couldn’t.

The second major point that haunts me daily is his challenge to us. Think of whatever your favorite saying might be about how or why you didn’t do something. For many of us, the issue is time. “I ran out of time,” we say. Or “I didn’t have enough time to complete that.” Business moves to the Just in Time theory. Servan-Schreiber challenges us to replace “life” for “time” because, as I think he rightly asserts, time is life. Following this point, we get “I ran out of life.” Or “I didn’t have enough life to complete that.” Or “I’ll do it when I have enough life.” Last night I tried this out on one of my close friends. He is an entrepreneur whose little company has grown into a nationally recognized business. He is busy all the time. I lobbed him the time-life connection. He was visibly shaken.

This morning — barely — at 11:42am, I was washing dishes from the dinner my friend came to the night before. I had woken up at 8am. What had I done between 8am and now? I had spoken to my daughter. I had cruised my favorite app, YOU. I had pondered patio furniture. I had pondered which book to read next and first. I had pondered doing a Google search to see how best to help another friend with her business. But in terms of doing? The most concrete thing was the dishes.

Standing at the sink, looking outside at the yellow umbrella and looping back to the incredibly important question of what to sit on outside, I said aloud, “Why do I have such trouble with the mornings?” And I mean that. I love the morning. I love the potential of the day, but when I am not in school, when I am on vacation, I lose mornings. I don’t know where the time goes.

I don’t know where the life goes. “I need a new morning routine,” I announced to the blue plate in my left hand and the blue sponge in my right. I scrubbed and thought about the new routine. Walk before tea? Meditation? Exercise first then tea then meditation? Writing before everything? Get out of bed, make bed, put on exercise clothes? The level of detail got even worse and a few plates elapsed before I was struck by the insight that lead me to sit here and write this (now) afternoon.

I don’t know how to spend my time. I don’t know how to spend my life.

I quite literally had to walk away from the computer after I wrote that. I had some lunch. Made some tea. Drank the tea. Had the horrible realization that for that cup at least, I no longer like the taste of tea, ate some crackers because I was still hungry and then opened my laptop.

Servan-Schreiber foresees, I think, exactly the impact of my epiphany. Earlier in the book, he advocates really coming to understand ourselves, who we are, what motivates us, what we might want to do. He advocates that we “foster a cleansing lucidity about ourselves” so that we can explore ourselves and our goals. I think I thought that I had done that, but my dish washing epiphany suggests otherwise.

I don’t think I’m alone. On paper, I look like I’ve done pretty well for myself. And off paper, for that matter. I have one child who is bright and a decent human being. She has a good job that her employer cut in half, but nevertheless, it allows her to do a lot. She is having success in freelance work. For any parent who might be reading this, I do not worry about her at all. For the parentless out there, this is for me at least, a huge endorsement of her and her vision for her life. I have a good job in my field, and I have always worked in my chosen field, which, given my field, is pretty surprising. I run a program I love. And for the most part, I happily drive to work. I recently — as in a few months ago — bought a house I can just afford, and my credit rating has tanked as a result, plus I helped my daughter buy a used 2007 Prius after her 1998 Volvo died. But those economic facts are part of life and they will change and, I hope, improve. I am healthy. I have great friends. I love my family.

So when I read books that suggest that radical change is the way forward, that we free ourselves from the shackles of jobs we hate or places we hate or people we hate and that we find our passion, I sit quietly and wonder, or I flip the page.

There must be a different way forward, one that does not relegate the remaining decades of my life to doing the same thing, but one that also does not reject everything, because there is little I want to outright reject. I am, therefore, in exactly the quandary that Servan-Schreiber describes: I have chosen my life — sort of. He discusses the need for a horizon, be it 10, 20, 30 years in the future, not as a kind of goal that must be reached, but as a frame for understanding where we are now. I need that horizon, but to get it, I need to know myself.

And that, for me, and I’m guessing for many of us, is not easy. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve experienced the 21st century version of flight or fight: I have wondered, “Hey, maybe Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber is still alive. I should Google search him.” I have scolded myself that I should stop writing this and get on with something that “really matters,” like writing my syllabi and starting my reading for the semester. The ability to fly away from the essential via technology is tempting, but I’m going to resist, and I’m asking you to resist too.

Here’s my proposal to you. Each post I will offer up one of Servan-Schreiber’s ideas. They are not quick or easy. But I think they will lead into some very useful insights. Also, I’m reading Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, published this year, which in some ways chimes with The Art of Time, so some of their ideas might make their way into the Servan-Schreiber. The goal at the end of this is to know how I — how you — want to spend our lives.

Let’s make good use of the time — of the life — we have.

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Melanie Eckford-Prossor

Written by

Has long been writing about time. She lives and teaches in California.

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