On my computer is a program called "Lotus Organizer," which enables me to create calendars, address books, to-do lists and a host of other things to expedite my work. Except that after I spend half-an-hour or so organizing my week and print out tasks to be done, I am overwhelmed. I can't possibly do it all. There just isn't enough time. It's almost as if a message appears on my screen: "Things to do today. See Things to do yesterday."
Nonetheless, because I am a Type A personality, somewhat task oriented, and a fairly intense person, I do accomplish enough work, I think, to merit my pay. I admit that sometimes I am so stressed out that I remember the workaholic's definition of heaven as "perpetual activity without fatigue."
Luckily, I seem to thrive on work, and even when trying to relax I am physically active - a three-mile walk six days a week, every other day on the rowing machine, twice a week lifting weights and once a week giving a full workout to my vocal chords. I try not to waste time, remembering humorist Robert Benchley who once said, "A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated."
A song that continually runs through my mind as I am running through my life is from The Pajama Game, "Hurry up, hurry up, can't waste time, can't waste time" a kind of coda for that popular musical show set in a pajama factory with a time-conscious manager. It seems they, and we, are on a treadmill from urgency to panic and back. The redoubtable Stephen Covey, never one to miss a trend, even has created a survey called an Urgency Index - I don't dare take it.
I have observed that most of us are rather intense in the pace of our lives. Our motor never stops. Our engine always runs, our battery always hums. Within our psychic boiler room there is always at least a skeleton crew, and that crew never takes a break. There is the whir of wheels endlessly turning.
And while we Americans are building an economic engine that is the envy of the world, one wonders if we are building a culture worth emulating. That theme is expounded in Arlie Russell Hochschild's popular book, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. In an exhaustive study of the Amerco corporation, she discovered that while men have often used work as an escape from the hassles and responsibilities of domestic life, now women are doing the same thing.
To many, home becomes just another workplace with all the time pressures, as people juggle two jobs, children and older parents, in three shifts. The first shift is employment; the second is the home; the third shift deals with the emotional fallout from tensions created by the first two. One third of the fathers and a fifth of the mothers admitted to being workaholics, and 89% complained of a "time famine" in their lives.[1]
Hochschild pointed out the paradox that now people can afford more things in their lives, but don't have the time to use them. Even when people can take time off with pay, increasingly they don't do it - they choose to work instead. Partly, of course, it is the pressure from companies trying to compete in the global economy, the assumption that people who succeed in business must work long hours, and that time is a symbol of commitment to the company. The term "family man" has taken on negative overtones, of one not committed to being a serious player at work.
As one male worker said about the demand of women for more family friendly policies, "Just because a few women are concerned about balance doesn't mean we change the rules. If they chose this career, they're going to have to pay for it in hours, just like the rest of us."[2]
What is worse, the home seems to be taking on the values of the workplace - efficiency becomes the transcendent value. Labor-saving devices, quick-fix meals, tightly scheduled routines and work are like a frenetic dance of life. In the struggle between home and workplace, workplace is winning. One father shook Hochschild's hand after an interview with the words, "I'm still hoping we can make our family a good production team."[3]
Even more indicative of the price we pay for the pressure of time in our lives is this report: "When one executive suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack, his grieving widow invited no one from the company to speak at the funeral. 'Why should I?' she exclaimed to a friend. 'It was the company that killed him!'"[4]
Hochschild illustrated the way the individual has been integrated into the great productive machinery of the culture by reference to Charlie Chaplin's silent film, Modern Times. Charlie is a hapless factory hand on an automated assembly line moving so fast that when he takes a moment to scratch his nose, he falls desperately behind. Dwarfed by the inhuman scale of the workplace, pressured by the line's relentless pace, Charlie quickly loses his humanity, goes mad, climbs into the giant machine that runs the conveyor belt, and becomes a machine part himself."[5]
Then Chaplin encounters the J. Willicomb Billow Feeding Machine which "automatically feeds your men at work.... Don't stop for lunch. Be ahead of your competition. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead.... There is the automatic soup plate with compressed air blower - no energy is required to cool the soup; and the revolving plate with automatic food pusher to double knee-action corn feeder with its syncro-mesh transition, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue; and finally there is the hydro-compressed sterilized mouth wiper which offers control against spots on the shirt front.
The hapless Chaplin is chosen to test the machine, and a salesman straps him into it, his arms immobilized. The machine begins to pour soup into his mouth, and, of course, finally down his shirt. Chaplin keeps a doubtful eye on the automatic mouth wiper, which periodically spins to roll over his lips and, if he doesn't stretch up his nose. Buttered corn on the cob appears, moving automatically back and forth across his mouth. As a deskilled eater, his only job is to bite and chew.
However, the corn, like the factory's conveyor belt, soon begins to speed up, moving back and forth so fast that he has no time to chew. The machine breaks. Impassive white-coated salesmen go to fix it, but it only malfunctions again, feeding Chaplin bolts with morsels of sandwich and splashing a cream pie in his face. The mouth wiper leaps out wildly to make a small, clean stripe across his smeared face, and Chaplin drops away from the machine in a faint."[6]
Aren't there times when you feel like that? Admit it. So, it does not take very careful observation to note that most of us are caught up in the time bind. We simply fill our days to overflowing. We overextend ourselves, in a most graphic image, we try to write on both sides of the paper at once. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh says, "The space is scribbled on, the time has been filled."[7]
However, we are in good company here. Remember that delightful little quatrain by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."
In more contemporary culture there is Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes cartoon characters. My favorite collection is The Days Are Just Packed. I don't know what Bill Watterson had in mind, but I do know those five words resonate in me. I am fond of complaining that there is too much to do - professionally and personally - and too little time to do it. Unitarian Universalists - with no monopoly on the practice - are fond of playing "One-ups-manship", seemingly complaining about how busy they are, when they are really bursting with pride at all the important things that crowd their lives. I know, because I am one of them. You probably are too.
My life is too full. I should slow down - as many of you have told me. On the other hand - and in our faith there is always an "on the other hand" - would I want the opposite? Would I want my days to lack the sense of urgency I feel now? Would I want large blocks of blank time on my calendar? That is not a rhetorical question with an implied "no." I'm not really sure. You probably aren't either. Perhaps a little balance. There's a Native American word for it - a word I can neither spell nor pronounce - and I'm too busy to look it up. I want my days to be full - but not so full that I am crowded out. I don't want to be caught in that ironic habit of people who run faster when they have lost their way.
Our forefather Henry David Thoreau, a century and a half ago asked, "Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life .... and in such desperate enterprises? ... As if you could kill time without injuring eternity .... Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in."[8] And while I am an avid fan of Henry David Thoreau, somehow the message of Walden is not getting through to me. I find myself often engaged in the hurry-up routine which Thoreau called St. Vitus Dance. Now, Thoreau did not have a family to raise - no kids to send to college; his six weeks of work a year was enough to fund his modest needs. A pencil doesn't put as much pressure on one as a computer screen. But over the century and a half since Walden appeared, he has wisdom for us.
"I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover than I have not lived.... I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.... If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it."
Time is fundamentally a religious question. Our purpose as Unitarian Universalists is not salvation; nor happiness. It is what have we done with our time on earth. How have we spent our days and hours? What did we do yesterday and what will we do today that is worth mentioning?
When we raise those questions, I suspect we will discover that the push, pull and pressure of the culture to succeed, to win, to produce, to be competitive, will seem awfully shallow. Have we evolved over these long millennia to find ourselves living harried and hectic lives? Is that what it's all about? Is that the end for which we strive so mightily?
We have, I think, not really understood the meaning of time. In the words of the old preacher, "God created time so everything wouldn't happen at once,"[9] even though it often seems that way. Time is not our enemy. Nor is it a commodity that can be owned.
Nor can we be like the writer who said, "I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passers-by to drop their unused minutes into it."[10] That is an ego-centric, quantitative and irreligious understanding of time. Instead time, spiritually speaking, is a mystery in which we live and move and have our being.
Meaningful time might be understood more as cyclical than linear. When we think linearly - we tend to panic - because each and every day we are closer to life's ending. If we think cyclically, we think of the seasons - this spring equinox is a good time for us to consider folding ourselves into the rhythms of nature - despite the caprice of a Western New York spring.
If we think cyclically, we think of the round of birth and life and death, we think in patterns greater than our life span. The sundial in the garden suggests a deeper meaning than the digital watch on our wrists with its insistent hourly chime and its inexorable morning alarm.
Time is best understood not as "faster is better," but in terms of our relation with that wider cosmic context in which we find ourselves. Oxford University recently replaced the gigantic oak beams in the ceiling of one of its dining halls. When the rotting beams were noticed there was concern about being able to replace them.
But when the dining hall was built 500 years ago, a grove of oak trees had been planted so that the university could replace the beams when the time came.[11]
Instead of that long view of time, we act as if there is no tomorrow, and plunge almost desperately into a frenzied tempo. Poets suggest that time should be lived "simultaneously, in two contradictory ways: as if our lives were endless and as if they would end right now."[12] We ought not try to cram in every day all that can possibly be fit there. Life is always unfinished business. Our spiritual agendas will never be completed.
On the other hand, let us not continually postpone life to some future time. Let us savor the moment, seize the day, but gently, lovingly.
"Does anyone have the time?" No, I'm not worrying about clock time, or even if this sermon has run over. I am concerned about being time - we all have the time - we all have this moment - we all have now - and that is the most precious time there is.
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