Time After Time

There’s an old joke about a management consultant who, while driving down a rural lane, spots a farmer holding a pig in his arms as the pig slowly eats apples off a tree. Dumbfounded, the consultant pulls over and hails the farmer, saying, excuse me but you could save a lot of time if you’d just put that pig on the ground and shake the tree. That way he can eat the apples whenever he’s hungry. The farmer obligingly listens, and after a few moments of contemplative silence he responds: You know, you’re probably right, but what’s time to a pig.

That joke sprung to mind as I read a scientific article a few weeks ago that concluded that dogs and humans judge time differently. According to the authors of this somewhat dubious study, an hour of human time can be like four hours to a dog. How this was discerned I cannot say, but it did cause me to reflect on the subjectivity of time. It is always too long when we are waiting, too short when we are running out of it. Time in the past was just yesterday, in the future it is distant. Indeed, what’s time to us humans?

Time has this indeterminate quality because contrary to human invention its measure in seconds, minutes and hours or days weeks, months and years are an artificial construct. A way of counting that we can agree upon to coordinate activities but of relatively little value beyond that. Most of us are unable to retain with any degree of accuracy the memory of past events—instead we have a diffuse sense of happy or sad moments, of some notable experiences and perhaps painful ones. But we do not have an evidence file filled with the minutiae of our everyday lives because quite frankly most of it just isn’t that memorable.

For some, those who have taught themselves to live more vitally there is a greater awareness of this precious commodity of the moment. Being in the moment is all about raising our consciousness above the mundane to become acutely aware of all that is transpiring around us, not just our own thoughts and reactions but those of the people with whom we are interacting. In one of his short stories entitled The Three Questions, Tolstoy wrote about a prince who was searching for the wisest man in his kingdom. He asked candidates to answer three questions: When is the right time to begin something; Who is the most important person to listen to; and What is the most important thing to do? It is a wonderful story but let me go directly to the answers. It turns out as illustrated by the events in this moralistic tale that the right time is now—the past cannot be changed, and the future is yet to come. The most important person is the one who you are with at the moment; they require your fullest attention. And the most important thing to do? That is to help that person with whatever it is they need to accomplish, in other words to serve others' needs first above your own.

It is a pretty good way to think about time--not as a commodity that we are doled out and spend, mindlessly or as a precious sand running through the hourglass, but as a tool for choosing how we navigate our relationships with others. Why this? Because the only and best use of our time is to be in relationship. Be it friend, family, lover or stranger, the only thing we truly own is our time and so the gift of it, our undivided attention and willingness to join with them is the most precious thing we can bestow.