I have a radio that picks up the Nation Bureau of Standards time signal from Boulder, Colorado. Driven by the vibration of cesium atoms the clock is the most accurate in the world and spits out a thing unhumbly called "Coordinated Universal Time." I set my watch to it. We all do. It's the standard everything runs on. When "Coordinated Universal Time" says it's noon … it's noon.
But that kind of time can feel like a prison if it's the only form of time we value and experience. There are other styles of time, friendlier to the inner world. Cyclical time, like the seasons changing, is never quite predicable but completely reliable. It will be cooler in Austin in Winter than in Summer (I hope). But when exactly the first freeze will hit we can't say. It's a fuzzier time. There is subjective time where a moment may seem like an hour and life like a moment. My favorite style of time is unstructured time, time that doesn't beep on the hour or require me to be or think in any certain way. It's time that comes from the inside.
Unstructured time is a day with no place I have to be at a certain time, an afternoon with no pre-made decisions, an expanse I can move through randomly. It's where internal quiet, intuition and creativity have a louder voice than that humming clock in the mountains outside of Boulder.
We are hypnotized by those cesium atoms in Colorado. Their vibration is a mesmerizing drumbeat in the background of everything. Traffic lights change to it, TV shows begin and end to it, you begin your workday to it, the electric power running through your walls is synched to it, the quartz watches on our wrists and alarm clocks by our beds are wedded to it. It's structured time, industrial time, computer time, business time, external time, the time we have to agree on. It's also a hungry time. It demands that we see things in a certain way, use our consciousness from the outside in and devalue the present.
The Zen guys are always saying things like eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired. But the truth is we usually have to eat when we can get out of the office for lunchtime. We sleep on a schedule so we can be ready for work. But the Zen experience refers to unstructured time. Not that a day lived without cesium clicking in the background doesn't take on a structure, but the structure comes from the internal realm and from nature. You know, when it's raining a cold rain, go inside. When the big light comes up in the East and all the critters are making a lot of noise get up and do something. When it's dark and cold sleep in a warm place. That's structure too.
But sometimes I feel like we're so addicted to normal time that we go out and create unnecessary tasks just so we can stay in the structure. It might get scary without that cesium purring in the background. But the real background of life isn't a high tech clock. It's eternity, spirit, consciousness, love. That's reality. The clock thing is something we made up, a device to help us organize. But it's not reality, it's just a tool. Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, "Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now." Unstructured time is a date with eternity. Maybe put that in your "Daytimer," Thursday from 1:00 &endash; 3:00, eternity.
….
We have this common idea that time is an inexorable and irreversible flow from one side of time to the other. The future gushes into the present and freezes in the past. What has flitted through the present is forever locked in the temporal ice of the past. The present is the smallest part of this system. Barely noticeable. It's the future and past that dominate, goals and history, unfulfilled desires and undone deeds, karma and destiny and work to be done. But the shrinking of the present is just a shift of consciousness that works with a goal setting, ambitious, acquisitive culture. We're trained in it. It's what grown ups do. It's "reality." It's also a bit of a fiction.
I remember when I was in grade school and I asked my Dad if I could ride my bike to another town with a friend. It was probably a forty-mile ride. I wanted an adventure. He said I was too young and should wait until high school to do that. In high school I heard I should wait for something else I wanted to do until I graduated. College, the same. Then there was the first job. Then… I did the math. I could do what I wanted when I was 65. My guess was I would forget what it was by then. It struck me as an odd way to think, putting off life now for some thought of life maybe happening later. It slowly dawned on me that "now" was important.
…
Being mesmerized by the rhythm of structured time came from the needs of industrialization. The world's first major efficiency expert, John Maxwell Taylor, was more responsible for the dehumanizing of time than anyone. We all joined him in wanting the benefits of industrialization but he vocalized, quite rabidly at times, the value of precise clock time as a container for living and working. He made a study of measuring every move a man or woman made in the workplace and then reduced everything to the most essential, almost abstract, movement. People didn't figure in. People became, under Taylor's model of reality, interchangeable parts in industrial processes.
Our humanity, our being, was a secondary concern to our productivity. We bought it. We made ourselves smaller than our clocks. We shrunk the present moment to the size of a bolt going on a wheel, a keystroke, a call, a billable moment, a soulless function.
I was lucky enough (although I didn't always think of it as lucky at the time) to spend a few years living outside of the box of "Coordinated Universal Time." I didn't own a watch. My days emerged from "now."
When I finally rejoined society in a more traditional way I quickly realized what I missed most was my unstructured time. Unstructured time is where the voice of the Divine has a chance to speak. Actually … it's always speaking. I guess what I mean is, it's when I had a chance to listen.
Industrial time isn't going away, nor should it. Yet Taylor's rigid vision, softened somewhat by the slow humanizing of the workplace, has its hold. But ordinary time is just an idea, a tool, a method. It's not the whole of reality. And we can step outside of that spell of cesium humming in the walls to remember ourselves, our larger selves.
We can make appointments with ourselves where we have nothing to do, no one to be. Thursday 1:00 &endash; 3:00 PM : eternity. What time is it? Now, it is always now. We are sitting right in middle of eternity. That's what time it really is.