Michael is the main character in Results in No Time. Michael is a banker on a quest to become an 'optimal worker'--someone who has mastered all aspects of work. Recently he heard about a newspaper reporter named Jed Adams who might be an optimal worker. He is now meeting with Jed for the second time . . .
Dinner With a Choice of Views
Michael Stewart and Jed Adams sat down at their table in the restaurant. "As I said before we parted last time, I'd like to learn more about 'timelessness' and 'linear time'. Would you tell me what you mean by 'linear time'?"
"Linear time is a feature of our Western cultural view of things. This world-view was apparently initiated by Newton some 300 years ago. It portrays time as an absolute physical reality, and says that the passage of time is independent of consciousness."
"What do you mean by, 'Time is independent of consciousness'?"
"It doesn't matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time, time doesn't change as a result."
Michael thought a while. "To me, that sounds like the way time should work. If clock time was relative, it wouldn't be useful. A standard measurement of time makes it possible to coordinate our activities by knowing what time it is no matter where we are on the globe."
"I agree with you. But there is much more to time than clock time's abstract indexing of physical events. Time isn't just a conceptual structure. It's also a felt experience. In fact, it's a wide variety of experiences."
The River of Time
Jed looked out at the Mississippi. "In our culture most temporal experiences can be represented by four metaphors. In the first, time is a river, and we're caught in the current. We feel out of control, helpless and unable to change time's relentless flow."
"Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of things to do and keep up with. Is that the kind of thing you mean?"
"That's part of it," Jed replied. "Linear time is a kind of combination of the actual feeling we have of time slipping from one moment to another, and all these feelings--like overwhelm and anxiety--that we have about time."
"Your phrase 'slipping from one moment to another' reminds me of an experience I had a few days ago. I was watching my favorite TV show, but I could hardly enjoy the show because I just kept thinking about a report I had to finish after the show was over. The feeling of time passing was really strong. And when I was working on the report before the show began, I had one of those great timeless experiences, too. The contrast between timelessness and the river of time was stark."
The Conveyor Belt
"So this river of time is one image of linear time," Jed continued. "In a similar image time is like a horizontal conveyor belt that moves from past to present to future at the same unchangeable speed for all of us." (Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 78-9.)
"And it doesn't matter what we think or feel or do?"
"Right. That impression is part of all these images of the linear view. With the conveyor belt, as with the river of time, we feel out of control, helpless and unable to change time's relentless movement. Anxiety and pressure about time are 'facts of life'."
"Do these feelings seem unchangeable because we presume that time is independent of us?"
"Yes. Then we can only try to adapt to time. It appears to us as unchangeable."
The Treadmill
They ordered from the menu, then Jed continued. "Sometimes time's conveyor seems like a treadmill that we're on. Everything's boring and repetitious. It feels like a drag. Maybe it even feels purposeless, like it's not going anywhere."
"I'm familiar with that. Sometimes it seems like the best I can do is keep up with things. It's impossible to get ahead, but I can't get out of the rat race."
"Yes, life can appear to be an endless series of challenges that we can't escape."
"That's three different images of linear time. Any more?" Michael asked as the waiter brought bread to the table.
The Hourglass
"There's an hourglass metaphor. When we're born we're given an hourglass full of the sands of time. With a normal hourglass, after the sand runs into the bottom half, we turn the hourglass upside down, and then we can measure out more time. But it seems like our hourglasses are broken at the bottom. So the sand runs out and we try to catch it, but it just slips through our fingers."
"I'm familiar with that feeling also. It's like time's running out. We don't have enough of it."
"Right. We're anxious, and sometimes there's fear--we might even be afraid of death. This image portrays very well our feeling that time is limited."
Winning the Battle Against Time
"With all these views, time seems like an enemy, something we're struggling against," Michael observed.
"Yes, the struggle or race against time is built into all these images of the linear view."
"This may be a dumb question, but do you see any way to win this battle?"
"No. But we have various tricks that we use to try to win. Procrastination is one. Procrastinating is like swimming at right angles to the current in the river of time, getting up on the bank, and then watching time roll by."
"But when I procrastinate," Michael said, "as I did with my report the other night, things get worse. I couldn't enjoy watching TV."
"Yes, it's impossible to enjoy things deeply without being fully involved. And you also said it worsened your experience of time. Using the weapon of procrastination in our struggle with time has drawbacks."
"So that doesn't help. What about all the time management practices? I've been using them for years now, and they've been helpful."
"Yes, they can be helpful, even necessary. I use time management techniques too, but by themselves they don't win the struggle against time."
"What do you mean?"
"Time management is usually done within the struggle with linear time. We make our to-do lists, prioritize, delegate, look at papers only once, and so on--all while we feel pressure and anxiety about time flowing in the background. Time management doesn't directly address our felt experience of struggling with time."
"Could you say more?"
"Time management 'believes in' the images of the river, conveyor, hourglass, and treadmill. It usually presumes that the river of time really does flow between past, present, and future, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. It just offers us different ways to tread water as we're swept downstream by the current."
Michael made a discouraged face. "It sounds pretty futile."
"By itself time management doesn't seem to provide much leverage in our struggle. We don't get any closer to the center of the circle, no closer to timelessness. But as I said before, it can be very helpful if combined with ways of dealing with linear time directly."
'Seeing Through' Time's Persuasiveness
"Well, if we can't win the battle against time, do we just resign ourselves to endless struggling?"
"No, and we don't need to give up either. Struggling and giving up still presume that the images of the linear view are 'real'. They still believe in the 'truth' of the images."
"They're not true?"
"These are all more-or-less-convincing views, not 'the reality' about time, or 'the way things are', even though a built-in part of the images is the message that 'this is the way time is, and it can't be changed'."
"What are our options?"
The Habit of Time
"As we discussed at our first meeting, the timeless perspective of peak experience seems to be the best option. Timelessness is a natural perspective. Little kids have no feeling of time passing. We learn the habit of experiencing time a certain way, depending on which culture we grow up in. Most of us in the West are so addicted to linear time that we don't know it. Some Western cultures, however--for example, some Native Americans--don't learn to experience time the same way as the rest of us." (Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 27-40.)
"This suggests that our perspectives of time are at least somewhat flexible." Michael leaned back and adjusted his napkin. "Do you have any idea of how our sense of time passing is created?"
"I can give a couple of examples that shed some light on the process. My wife Becky and I were at the end of a wonderful weekend at a lake in Wisconsin. We had both slowed down to the point where we just timelessly looked out on the lake as the sun went down below a cloak of color. But she had to leave on a business trip that evening. After she packed her bags, we said goodbye. I felt very sad. But rather than deal with the sadness, I started thinking about when we'd be together again, a week later. As we put her things into the car I said, 'I miss you already.' And I actually did feel a bit as though she had already left. Time slipped by quickly as I unsuccessfully tried to savor the last moments with her."
"That's very much like the change from timelessness to linear time that I felt when finishing a report a few days ago."
"I think what happened was that I avoided the sadness, and then the repressed sadness energy showed up as my intensified feeling of time passing."
"So the sadness was somehow transformed into a feeling of time?"
"I believe so. It seems that repressed energy like sadness doesn't just disappear, it changes form."
Unwitting Creativity
Jed continued: "Your example of procrastination while writing your report some days ago is probably another good example of how we create or intensify our SOTP."
"SOTP?"
"Sorry, sense of time passing. I use the phrase so much I abbreviate it to SOTP."
The waiter brought their coffee to the table, and Jed continued. "Did you say that before you procrastinated you were timelessly involved in your report writing?"
"Right. I was engrossed, and there was no sense of time passing at all. No sense of past, present, or future."
"Then what happened?"
"I realized that my favorite TV program was coming on soon, and decided to finish the job after the show."
"What happened right before you started thinking about the TV show?"
"Not much. I got to a point in my writing where I was stuck."
"How did you feel?"
"I guess I was confused."
"So it's possible that rather than feel confused, you got distracted and started thinking about the TV show."
"I think you're right."
Then Jed summarized. "So in my case it was sadness, in your case it was confusion, but in either case there was some feeling that we didn't want to feel and attend to. Rather than face the feeling, we started thinking about 'the future', a better future. And soon we ended up anxiously aware of time passing in the background."
"With a divided attention unable to fully appreciate what was right in front of us," Michael added.
"Before you procrastinated, there was no SOTP at all. There was no conveyor belt at all, no feeling of past, present, and future. By procrastinating you created the conveyor of time, or at least intensifed time's flow."
"So the energy of the feeling that we don't like is pushed away, and it changes into the experience of time passing between past, present, and future?"
"Yes. The energy isn't lost, it's just changed to a different form."
SOTP Stops Us
"And I would go so far as to say that that repressed energy is all that constitutes the common experience of time. The sum total of our SOTP seems to come from having previously resisted these energies."
Jed put his credit card on the table and continued. "It's quite a remarkable creation. Something that feels so real, yet is fabricated one small feeling at a time."
"That's all there is to it? There's no part of our SOTP that matches a standard external flow of physical time? Isn't our internal flow somehow tracking a 'real' flow rate at which external events occur?"
"I don't believe so. The idea of a fixed or constant rate for time is simply part of the linear view that we teach each other, as we discussed earlier. Scientists have never discovered anything like a standard flow of time in nature. In fact these days they say that time is relative to the observer."
Michael was silent awhile. "That's very interesting. I guess I've always thought that my SOTP somehow reflected the 'real', constant rate at which all events happen."
"Yes, that's what we learn. Then we go even farther and teach that if our SOTP doesn't closely match some imagined rate of events, it's faulty and 'inaccurate'."
"I know what you mean. We use the phrase 'losing track of time' to indicate a kind of negligence when our SOTP doesn't 'accurately track' the imagined external rate of time."
Michael recalled the previous point. "So the sum total of our SOTP is repressed energy from having resisted things."
"And unfortunately it's carried forward to whatever we're doing. So I think we can say that our SOTP is a measure of how much we're holding back from whatever we're doing, how much we feel separate from an activity."
"Is that what you call a 'guiding principle'?"
"Yes. 'SOTP measures how much you're separate from what's happening.' Whenever we find ourselves living out a scenario where time seems like a threat or a drag, the principle can remind us of other possibilities."
"I guess it could remind us that our situation can be improved if we somehow move toward timelessness."
"Yes." Jed signed the charge slip.
"On the other hand, if we're always in timelessness, how can we meet deadlines, or make appointments and keep them? Especially people like you for whom deadlines are a way of life?"
SOTP Vs. SOT
"There's a difference between our 'sense of time' and our SOTP. I have a great SOT, or sense of time. That is, I am good at guessing the position of the clock's hands--what the clock time is--and use the information to meet my deadlines. But having a good sense of time doesn't mean that I must feel time passing. There's a difference between the actual sensation of time flowing and thoughts about clock time that just index events of our lives."
"So you're saying that your feeling of time passing, or SOTP, is different from your sense of time, which is just the ability to know the current clock time?"
"Yes," Adams said. "I heard about an open-heart surgeon who is probably timelessly involved as he concentrates on the extremely difficult surgery. Yet while he concentrates it is necessary for him to know clock time so that he can move from one operating room to another and coordinate his part of the work with others who prepare the patients for him. While engrossed he can still tell time 'with only half a minute margin of error, without consulting a watch'." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 66.)
"That's amazing."
"Maybe it shows what is possible for us. It's important to recognize the difference between our SOT and SOTP. SOTP is a measure of our lack of involvement; it shows how separate we are from whatever we're doing."
"So ideally it will gradually disappear, or transform toward timelessness."
"Yes. But our SOT is quite useful, and we should not confuse it with our SOTP. If we do, we might try to ignore watches and clocks and stop thinking about the past and future."
"That would make it really hard to get along in modern society." Michael summarized: "So ideally we would keep or even improve our SOT while dismantling our SOTP."
"Exactly. And that's what seems to happen as we move to excellence."
Copyright © 1996 by Stephen Randall.
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