I was surprised by a new single dropping onto my Spotify feed last week from John (Cougar) Mellencamp. It’s a great track, also featuring Bruce Springstein – a bit like a deep gravelly voice grand final sing-off, missing only recent Bob Dylan – and it’s called ‘Wasted Days’. It made me reflect. Is it really possible to waste a day?
According to Charles Darwin, “A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.” With respect to one of the grandees of the scientific revolution, I have to say that I think this thinking is absolute nonsense. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a person who fills every hour of their existence with activity has sadly and utterly missed the greatest opportunity that life offers us.
Although I am headed into a practical work space in this blog, a nod to the theoretical might be helpful. Einstein helped to establish the concept that time is a real thing but other scientists have sought to amend and challenge that belief. In 2017 Carlo Rovelli published his beautiful book The Order of Time and described the idea of time as a construct that is ‘warped’ by the physical entities it encounters. Put simply, the word ‘time’, for Rovelli, is too much of a simplification to be a helpful definition. To anyone who has ever truly, wonderfully, blissfully ‘lost track’ of time, that will make a great deal of sense. What is ‘time’ to a painter, or a writer or a lover or an inventor? At best it marks where you departed from and where you returned to the constructed piste map of linear existence. Enough science and philosophy…
But the historian in me (and what is history if there is no time?) is stirred to contribute. The concept of the measurement of time really wasn’t handed down from Mount Sinai (or anywhere else) with directions for its use written in stone. The need to tell time originates from the need for humans to find ways to predict a future moment when their actions can be coordinated. If you think about it, if you lived entirely alone and away from other humans, you would have absolutely no need to know the time at all. You would do whatever you wanted to do, whenever you wanted to do it. Like a permanent version of your parents being out of town.
Early time telling devices separated morning from afternoon and winter from summer; increasing sophistication allowed people to be more accurate and to bring greater discipline to social behaviours. For example, Greenwich Mean Time became the standard of time in the United Kingdom only after it was decided that it was impossible to enforce new liquor licensing laws in a country where each neighbourhood ran its own local solar time. Closing time in Greenwich was always time for last orders not far down the road. The 19th century was a period of raging international debate about the need for all of us to tell the same time at the same time..industrialised society demanded it where the agrarian economies ran (and still run in many parts of the world) with less need for the ringing of timely bells to tell people what they should be doing.
Let me get back to Darwin. My essential issue with his view of time wasting is that you can’t waste something that is fundamentally beyond our ability to own, control or even satisfactorily define. Furthermore, the elegant wasting of time, the active engagement with a present moment which is free of clocks and devices and nano demands on every second has a name in the 21st century. It’s called mindfulness (of course it’s a very ancient concept but has been popularised and mainstreamed under this name over recent decades).
So let’s look at work. If we accept, for a moment, that time is real and that we have a finite amount of it to spend each day, in a work setting, what constitutes waste?
Is it wandering around the corridors chatting to people? Is it sitting down to watch others do their work, implicitly neglecting your own tasks? Is it having a mug of coffee in the canteen and chatting with the barista? Is it sitting on a bench in the token green area to watch the ways in which shadows play across the courtyard?
Is it a waste of time to slip out and buy someone a birthday card? Or to tack on an extra half an hour to lunch to treat a colleague? Is it a waste to allow yourself an hour in the gym, or half an hour on the phone with your kids before their bedtime?
Is it a waste of time to speak with the security guard on the entrance desk or the contractor watering the plants? Is it a waste to close your laptop for half an hour, find a comfy sofa and think about your day? Even doze a little?
Waste? If you did any or all of these things in a day, it won’t answer the emails, won’t write the reports, and won’t make the phone calls you promised to make. To get those done, will you simply slice off a decent sized chunk of your home life and do them tonight, or over the weekend because they are so terribly important?
As we allowed ourselves to become subservient to the atomic precision of measured time, we allowed simultaneously, the belief that busy is good and idle is bad. We think: value for money, productivity, meet the deadline, deliver the deliverables, measure the measurables…and we drive ourselves into a helpless and hopeless frenzy of busyness that causes stress, anxiety, diminishing return, depression, hopelessness and resignation. In the end, we come to accept it and we accept that we are on a merry-go-round that we can’t get off. We don’t have the time.
Is this age talking or is it experience? Maybe it’s a bit off both but I was one of those, broken on the wheel everyday; I was Prometheus, my liver growing back every evening to be mercilessly pecked out again, every working day. I believed that by proving how busy I was, I proved my worth. I judged others who were less busy and assumed they were lacking or lazy or both. I sacrificed home time, relationships, interests, all those moments to write, paint, love, invent. I even sacrificed that free spa of rejuvenation and health – my own sleep – on the altar of ‘there’s no time to…’
So I offer this view as a reformed hypocrite, because I did all of these things. But I was wrong. And when I see organisations now that celebrate a culture of transaction over thought, of bottom line over top line, of efficiency over care, I see organisations and I coach individuals who are driving themselves over the cliff.
My golden memory from school was a classroom in the senior primary school. If you were lucky, you would be seated beside the window which gave on to a wondrous view of waving pampas grasses, twisting hedgerows, creaking oak boughs and an endless carnival of blowing leaves. There I did my learning. The loss of whatever was going on inside the room was as nothing to the gains I made in daydreaming.
We are human beings and our purpose is not to be productive. That’s not a rule. I don’t know what purpose we have, if any, but I know that the opportunity we have is to be alive and to feel the richness of life around us. That opportunity is open to both princess and pauper. It isn’t time that you waste when you prioritise your emails over your family or over your own health, it’s the chance to be alive.
If Stephen Hawking was right when he said, “The Universe is the ultimate free lunch”, are you seriously too busy to eat?
We’re busy doin’ nothin’
Workin’ the whole day through
Tryin’ to find lots of things not to do
We’re busy goin’ nowhere
Isn’t it just a crime
We’d like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time
(lyrics by Bing Crosby from the movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)
