Open Minds: No time like the present / Tim Lott - The Times, August 23, 2009

When asked the question, “What is time?” St Augustine answered: “I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don’t.” Unlike Augustine, we insist that we know. We have sliced time up into seconds, minutes, days, months, years and called the resulting abstract fantasy real. Since we define time as the stuff of clocks and calendars, time is mechanical. We even mistake it for something material. We talk of “spending” time, of “saving” it, of “losing” it, of “investing” it, of “wasting” it. We assert that “Time is money”. All this implies that we “have” time in the first place.

For us, the future and the past stretch away for aeons in opposite directions and the present occupies the infinitesimal space between the two. We are always clutching at this elusive moment, even though it slips away as soon as we reach for it. We have the sensation that time is running out. We’re always getting ready for something — something that never arrives.

Carpe diem — “seize the day” — urges the Latin motto. But time cannot be seized because it is not “something”. You can’t “have” time any more than you can touch the equator, because time is simply a nominal measurement — of energy, growth, decay, movement, activity. It is the distance between events. Those events are real, but the way we think about them in time is a convention.

The idea that time is not “real” is hard to swallow — but it is not the only fallacy under which we labour, or even the most important. For instance, we insist that the past is the primary force that pushes us forward. We think of the present world as merely the end product of an endless chain of past causality, which is one of the reasons we are so hung up on what has gone before.

So it is easy to forget that the past is actually the result of the present. It is the present, not the past, that is powerful. As any historian knows, the present is constantly changing the shape and meaning of the past. And the universe didn’t emerge out of the past — it started in a “now” moment, out of nothing, with the Big Bang. We have been in a “now” moment ever since, the past trailing behind us, like the wake of a ship. The universe is coming out of nowhere right now.

The Big Bang is still happening.

Why does any of this matter? Because the way we have come to think about time has made many of us unhappy, since we have lost touch with the present. For many people, the present hardly appears real at all.

We are in such a hurry. We see our lives as finite. For most of us, there is no afterlife to hope for, so we are in a panic to get as much as possible done before it all collapses into nothingness. And the anxiety about encroaching oblivion also needs to be kept at bay — another reason to rush, so that a condition of permanent distraction can be maintained.

Technology and late capitalism have all added to the fierce speed of life. Perhaps that is why so many of us obsessively try to capture the moment in a photograph — because the moment seems so elusive.

Our mistake lies in believing not only that the present is a “thing” to be captured, but also that this “thing” is somehow infinitesimally small and elusive. On the contrary, the present is all there is. It is everything and everywhere. Even our thoughts about the past and the future take place in the present.

Pragmatists might argue that a present-centred mind-set — what Zen Buddhists call “mindfulness” — is a recipe for irresponsibility. But I am not saying you should fail to learn lessons from the past or make plans for the future. Only that it is silly to get hung up on the past when it can be such an unreliable guide to the future, and that planning for the future is futile if we are too busy chasing the moment for it to ever arrive. And it cannot arrive because it is already here.

Someone who is mentally disturbed is often described as being “not all there”. We are not all there as a culture because of our alienation from the present. Some of us live our entire lives without ever really being “there”. It’s certainly the way I felt much of my youth when I was perpetually pursuing dreams of future success, wealth and fame. Now, at 53, I feel I have settled into the present, and it is a much more comfortable place to be. In reality, it is the only place you can be.

Our modern relationship with time, however neurotic, has brought great material and practical benefits. But it may be a devil’s bargain. Those benefits are all in vain if we can never sit still enough to enjoy all that we have gained. Clocks are useful — but they can be tyrants. Planning is useful — if you remember that the future is always now.

We can cease being slaves to time. But the paradox is that in order to master it, we must first stop trying so hard to do so. And before we can do that, we must stop insisting that it exists in the first place.