Can you remember a time when you were not conscious of time?
The last time I can remember not having a sense of time was the summer after third grade. The days spread before me without end, and I inhabited each with no sense of the coming autumn. I did not think about the next week or even the evening of the day I was living. I simply did not look ahead. Now, I watch people read books, take classes, and meditate, trying to get to presence. But when I was eight, presence was all there was.
I don't know when I fell into time, but it was sometime after that summer. Slowly at first, and then all at once, time took shape. I learned to read a calendar and the calendar began to superimpose its grid onto my life.
Still, the grid notwithstanding, before I had children, time generally moved at a stately pace. Days had a steady rhythm. I look back and see life as a slow-moving river. In contrast, when I look back at the years following the births of my daughters, I see a blur of swiftly moving water.
On the rare occasions when I stopped to think about the future during those happy/crazy/filled-to-the-brim years, I assumed that when my girls were grown, life would return to its pre-child-rearing pace.
Alas, it did not.
So maybe it wasn't having children that changed my sense of time. Maybe it was something else altogether.
Maybe it was technology.
After all, it was during those (for me) post-baby years of the late '80s and early '90s that the whole world started to speed up. First it was Fax machines. Remember those? Until they came along, I would receive a letter at work, consider it, maybe wait a day, then dictate a reply, which my assistant would duly type up and mail. Now, clients would send the letter via fax and expect a response within hours.
Things only got worse with email. There was no longer a breather between the time a fax was sent and the time someone brought it to my desk. Now the messages were showing up on my computer. What was my excuse for not responding immediately?
But the real change came with cell phones. If you have a cell phone, why can't you take a business call at home? Or while on vacation? And then along came smart phones. Great for taking pictures, but they also captured emails and texts. Yikes.
Look, I am not a Ludite. I like my cell phone. Most of the time. I just don't like 24/7 anything. I don't like the temptation to check for email or text messages when I am doing something that used to be all-engrossing. I don't like the fact that I find it more difficult to concentrate than I did before all of these distractions.
I am very grateful that my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood were device-free. I don't know how to tell those of you born after the dawn of the age of distraction what those pre-distraction days were like, but I will try.
I see myself at about age ten, playing on our dead-end street with my friends. There was no impulse to run home and check my iPad for messages because there were no iPads. I just played. We just played.
I see myself at around age 14, walking through the woods to a local library, lost in my own thoughts. There was no buzzing in my pocket. No stopping to respond to a text.
I see myself again in my late 20s, when I would sometimes, while doing something interesting, unplug my phone. (This was back when phones were tethered to the wall.) From time to time, I forgot to plug it back in, only remembering when I realized I hadn't received a phone call for a couple of days.
And there I am as a young mother, nursing a baby, no smart phone to interrupt my returning her steady gaze.
In that pre-digital age, days were round and whole, not fragmented. If I was reading, I was reading. If I was writing I was writing. If I was with someone, I was with them. I wasn't feeling a pull to check my phone for texts or emails or voice mails.
Of course, there is much that is wonderful about technology. During the years my daughter Anne was living overseas, we talked weekly via Skype. For free. In real time. I could see her face as she spoke. What a gift. When my daughter Mara was in college, she would sometimes call me as she walked across her very large campus. Long-distance charges were a thing of the past. Another gift.
I do love using texts to share photos or quick messages with friends.
And wouldn't I have liked texts or emails back when I was PTO president at my daughters' elementary school and had to use a phone tree to get a message to other parents?
So, yes, technology is a double-edged sword, but acknowledging its plus side does not change the fact that it has (at least for me) sped up and fractured time. With attention, though, I think it is possible to counter the fracturing.
I started this post by naming the summer after third grade as the last time I was unconscious of time. Upon further reflection, I realize this is not true. It takes more effort now, but there are moments--if I am lucky, hours--when I am engrossed in, say, writing or reading or gardening to the point where I am unaware of time. This is not the natural state that it was during that long-ago summer. But, if I turn off my phone and leave it in another room, I am sometimes able to step outside of time again.
And for that I am grateful.
Photo by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash
