Making Time: How to Create the Moments of Our Lives

My friends and I spend a good bit of time thinking about the passing of our lives. None of us is preoccupied with death nor especially fearful of it. But we're realistic enough to know that most of life is behind us.

We've all had close friends and family members who've passed away. Our bodies—and minds—don't function quite as well as they used to. We feel pushed to the front lines of life's inevitable confrontation with what lies beyond.

A fellow oldster, Mick Jagger, famously crooned, "Time is on my side." None of us—nor presumably that aging rocker—believe that now. The future is shorter than it used to be. The past seems farther away. And the calendar, at least in retrospect, rolls ever faster. Things that happened a year ago feel like they were just six months. Has it really been 20 years since we all took that family trip?

For those who are older then, the special challenge is to live each day well, cultivate important relationships, and stay involved in the challenges of the emerging present.

That said, we're not the only ones who obsess about time. People in midlife commonly complain about busyness. There are, it seems, too few hours in the day to achieve all the things we want to do. Indeed, those "wants" commonly become subordinated to "needs." Even moments of personal discretion—having friends and family over, exercising, and finding "me time"—may be cloaked in that rhetoric of obligation.

Moreover, the list of things we should be doing prominently includes commitments to the future. How are the retirement savings coming along? What about Junior's college fund? Who will step up as Mom's health worsens?

For midlife people, "time management"—essentially juggling time, energy, and resources—is a dominant concern.

Let's not forget the young, those with a limited past and presumably boundless future. Psychologists inform us that because the mental processes of young people happen faster than those of older people, the young experience events as moving more slowly. Fifteen minutes in "time out" is a long time for a young child. Sitting quietly for an hour during a school class or worship service is an eternity.

There are other reasons time hangs heavily for the young. Commonly enough, they are subjected to the regimes of adults, who expect them to perform assigned tasks and otherwise endure patiently. Acknowledge, too, that a short period in the life of an older adult—say, three months—is a very substantial portion of the remembered life of a young person.

Whatever the causes, young people routinely claim to be "bored." At least that's the case when they are not hobnobbing with their friends or pursuing self-chosen enjoyments.

My point is simply that the different age groups routinely identify time—whether too little or too much of it—as a problem in their lives.

The limitations of modern "clock" time

Philosophers debate whether time is a "real" or objective thing or a human way of conceptualizing changing events. What is clear is that the elements of the world continually alter their relationships to one another. A twig floats down a stream, the sun rises and sets, creatures alternate between moments of rest and activity. No day is like another.

Time is our way of marking these transitions.

Most of us in the modern world imagine time to be an endless, straight highway along which everything that has ever happened can be arrayed. Just as historical events can be placed between mileposts, our life span takes place. Occurrences in the past are gone forever; the present is the continuously moving knife edge of events, the future occasions yet to be.

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Clocks and calendars—with their seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years—make the transition plain. Time never speeds up or slows down. It is a steady ticking.

However, there are other kinds of time. Psychological time is people's awareness of events and their placement within them. Those events can seem to move quite slowly (a week waiting for the results of a medical test.) or quickly (a pleasant vacation at the beach). In that sense, psychological time is our sense that something has begun, transpired, and ended and that we are ready for a new moment of living.

Biological time is something else. Like other creatures, our bodies have their own needs and rhythms. We're born, come to maturity, grow old, and die. Those processes and their culmination cannot be ignored. Against that scheme, the spell of clocks is an interesting irrelevancy.

As a social scientist, I have a special interest in social time. Groups and organizations have their lifespans. So do social occasions and events. All have their beginnings, middles, and ends. A party, dance, or wedding ceremony is not complete until it fulfills itself.

Some modern sports events incorporate clocks into the play, but notably, the "game clock" is disconnected from external or standard time. Whatever one's watch says, the opera isn't over until the proverbial fat lady sings.

Just as there is environmental time (think of the movements of the universe or the shifting contours of the earth), so there is cultural time. Every society has a shared understanding of what kinds of time should be honored. Modern societies strongly encourage everyone to follow a standard time and calendar. Only then can businesses, schools, churches, and government offices gather their members and coordinate their work.

But traditional societies give much wider latitude to the logic of social occasions and rituals. Public events spill over their customary boundaries, disrupting other social commitments. The past asserts its supremacy over everything people do.

All this raises the question: If people are to be time-conscious, what is the specific kind of time they should be conscious of?

"Making" instead of "spending" time

Once again, our modern world encourages us to think of time as a scarce commodity. There are only so many hours in a day and days in a year. We must choose how we spend them.

Thoroughly indoctrinated, we accept the logic of this proposition. But it ignores the issue of what we are purchasing with our chronological expenditure. Frequently, time is equated to money. But that's another way to say we should devote ourselves to productive capacity and material acquisition.

Plainly, directing one's life energies in this way leads to culturally approved outcomes; however, that activity may also violate other important standards of time. Whatever our commitments to the clock, the claims of our bodies, minds, social relationships, and the natural environment are not to be denied.

I've written before about what I call the "productivity compulsion," the urge to always stay busy, and fashion products of various sorts. That industrious spirit, essentially putting off momentary pleasures for long-term gains, has much to recommend it. The future is enabled by people who work hard.

However, that way of spending time has its limitations. Frequently, the worker is inattentive to the rhythms of their own body, their mind's need for excitement, and the requirements of their relationships with others. It is important to build experiences as well as products. As the old saying states, few people on their deathbed wish they had spent more time at the office.

"Quality time," to use the popular expression, is not something that simply happens, perhaps by blocking out a couple of hours from the work week. It must be "made." It is constructed through the efforts of the people involved. Pointedly, that time—in its psychological, biological, and social senses—will not otherwise exist.

That is why play and communion—two central themes of this post—are such important elements of life. Purposefully cutting themselves off from other obligations, people commit themselves to one another in attentive, creative, and spontaneous ways. They experience feelings of completion or "consummation." Relationships are built and reinforced. The best outcomes are fun and joy.

Those "times" together should not be depleted of energy; they should energize. They should not use up personal resources but rather enhance them. And ultimately, they should build the happy memories that are the best contributions of the past to our ongoing lives.