Time Isn’t Holding Us
Lesley Alderman
Word Count 555
My mother was always late. I vividly remember being the last kid picked up from birthday parties and waiting anxiously at airports for her yellow station wagon to appear around the corner. Running late with her was no less stressful. Speeding through traffic in a futile effort to make up for her late start, my father would be fuming behind the wheel, and my mother would be doing some last-minute task like mending the hem on her dress. Those minutes seemed like hours.
Time is subjective. Minutes spent waiting multiply; mundane tasks drag on. I recently timed how long it takes me to empty the dishwasher: 5 minutes. I had predicted it would take 15. Yet, blissful experiences, when we’re in the flow, seem to speed by. As Einstein observed: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
My mother liked to fill time to the brim. It made her chronically late, but also incredibly industrious. It wasn’t until I was an adult and met people from other countries and cultures that I realized not everyone operated on the edge of time. Some people think that less is more and allow ample time to get everywhere.
Time is confounding: It stands still. It flies. And it goes in cycles. There is no time like the present but tomorrow is another day. Ever since Einstein, we know that time (along with everything else) is relative. Poets wrestle with it, scientists measure it, and businesspeople try to lasso it into submission. And we all want to be reassured—don’t we?—that we are not wasting the finite hours we have before us.
Americans generally feel time pressed. More than 1 out of 4 working adults say they don’t have enough time to get done what they need to do, which makes them feel less satisfied with their lives and more stressed out. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who believe that science is making life change too quickly has been rising for the past five years.
The faster life becomes, the more we try to catch up with it. We want smarter phones, higher-performing computers, and faster food. We pride ourselves on multitasking and productivity. But then we flock to yoga and meditation classes, spin records the old-fashioned way, and cook slow food in an attempt to connect with the present moment. It’s a constant struggle between our desire for instant gratification and our need for peace and reflection.Perhaps because of my mother’s peculiar attitude toward time, I have always been acutely aware of it. As a child I would write my schedule for the evening on a black chalkboard in my room: 6:00 P.M. homework, 7:00 P.M. call Karen, 7:30 P.M. Gilligan’s Island. You get the idea.
As I got older, I used time in an attempt to make order out of chaos. I timed how long it took me to get to the nearest subway stop, to read a page of a book, and to fold a pile of laundry. I even timed my romances: after three months of dating, if I was not in love, then it was time to move on.
Lesley is a psychotherapist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has been a staff editor at Money and Real Simplemagazines (where she learned about frugality and the quickest way to clean a kitchen), and was a co-author of a New York Times column on the personal costs of healthcare, Patient Money.