from: World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (Bauhan Publishing, 2011)
from Chapter 1: HURRY SICKNESS
The minute rages in the clock.
— Theodore Roethke
Hurry Sickness
When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch, that “wonderful kind of engine…a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal [glass!],” they told themselves it had to be his god. After all, “he very seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.”
Gulliver carried a single time-piece with him, one small imperious deity, no doubt an old-fashioned turnip watch on a silver chain. Such watches could be slipped into one’s fob or waistband pocket when they were not needed. Nowadays, time is not so easily disposed of. It eyes us from the edge of our computer screen, or the dashboard of our car; ticks away the minutes on the clock beside our bed. There are clocks set into our ovens, our cell-phones, our palm-pilots: a pantheon of tiny fretful gods, each one berating us under its breath for not meeting our commitments right this minute. Tick. Tick-tock! Or click! as the numbers shift against the grayed-out screen. If you are lucky enough to survive the full stretch of your allotted span, you have approximately… 13 million minutes left. No wonder we feel overscheduled, overwhelmed.
Even vacation time can be eaten up by speed. My friend Joan lives in the country, far from family and friends. She and her sister had not seen each other since Christmas. But when Ellie came to visit, along with her two young daughters, “It was like a washing-machine experience – and then they were gone.” They climbed a mountain, they shared a barbecue together, and everyone took lots of photographs. But Joan and Ellie “didn’t have a single decent conversation,” and there was no time to talk to her nieces either. When they left, Joan told me, she felt absolutely bereft. She thought it was because they live in the middle of the city, and “they just don’t know how to stop.”
Joan lives on the west coast of Scotland, and her sister is based in Edinburgh. But their story is all too familiar, perhaps especially in the United States. As the sociologist Juliet Schor points out, we “work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.” Meanwhile the prices continue to rise: healthcare, childcare, education, gas. Despite the growing unemployment figures, the average U.S. citizen now works 270 more hours a year than his or her European counterpart, the equivalent of more than two whole months.
Not surprisingly, Thoreau’s “margins” (free time and leisure time, even tea and coffee-breaks) have continued to shrink – by as much as 37% since 1973. Vacations have diminished to two- and three-day mini excursions. The weekend is for crashing out, or catching up on household chores. The Sabbath is for shopping. For decades, “luxury time” has been at risk (the time to read or write a novel, to bake a birthday cake or tend a garden), but now essential human time is in jeopardy too. It doesn’t help that most of us spend at least eight and a half hours a day bowed over some screen or another (TV, computer monitor, mobile phone), often simultaneously. In the States today, there is scarcely time to catch your breath and check your e-mail, far less play with your children or talk in a leisurely fashion with your spouse. At least a third of us report that we have no time to reflect on what we’re doing, that we almost always feel rushed.
Such “hurry sickness” (the phrase originates with Dr. Larry Dossey) speeds up our heart and breathing rates, leading to ulcers, hypertension and high blood pressure, along with a growing dependence on alcohol and cigarettes. The Chinese ideogram “busy” is made up of two characters, “heart” and “killing,” and this is accurate: the new emphasis on speed and efficiency is, quite literally, damaging our hearts. Computers operate in nanoseconds, and we try, vainly, to keep up, like an old dog panting along behind his master’s sports car. But a nanosecond is only a billionth of a second, and humanly, cannot be experienced, so our effort to synchronize ourselves is doomed to failure. Are we happy nonetheless? Are we enjoying ourselves? We are moving too fast to come up with an answer.
Consider a world without sidewalks, a world where loitering is forbidden, and musing is seen as a synonym for befuddlement or confusion. It’s a world stuck in fifth gear, a world where there is no time to look forward or backwards, only the bleating nanosecond of the present. It is becoming, alas, the world in which we live.
You can buy a copy of World Enough & Time direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including In Praise of Listening:
A Gathering of Stories.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.