For centuries, be it a stone dial, pocket or wristwatch, grandfather, analog, or digital clock, societies have agreed: tracking the time of day is paramount to one's success.
Time waits for no man.
The early bird catches the worm.
Punctuality is the soul of business.
To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late is unacceptable.
No matter how well-intentioned these phrases be, our decision to obsess on time is a decision to disengage from the present moment and subject ourselves to an anxiety ridden future.
Phrases meant to instill a strong work ethic and healthy level of respect for others, instead, have contributed to the growing mental health crisis gripping professionals and students alike.
Lost time is never found again… and that's okay.
We have all been there.
Perhaps we have been the offender.
You're sitting in a meeting, a date, a group hang, or just passing time with a friend.
You are engrossed in the experience, so focused on the present moment, trying to actively listen, to have true conversations and bring forth meaningful moments.
And you do.
Your boss is showing signs that they appreciate your time and effort, your date tilts their head ever so slightly and smiles as you lock eyes, your friends gasp for air as tears roll down their faces.
As the world passes around you in the background, time seems to stand still as you feel appreciation, love, and joy.
These moments validate the deepest emotions of our existence.
Yet, a subtle shift of the arm, tilt of the head, and disengagement of the eyes steals the breath from our souls.
An uppercut to the abdomen of our being, we feel disregarded when in the midst of these life giving moments, someone checks their watch.
Suddenly, the noise filters back in, the world speeds back up, and we are left feeling secondary to the intricate machine, meticulously measuring the passage of time.
Man waits for no time.
From June 19–July 23, 2024, I walked The Camino.
Roughly 500-miles, I tramped from St. Jean Pierre de Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain on pilgrimage to the Cathedral of the Apostle St. James.
Nothing like Martin Sheen's movie The Way, walking The Camino is an experience that shoves, at minimum, 10 years of life experience into one's already burgeoning jar of life lessons.
Between the daily planning of mileage, scrounging for food during Spain's siesta, navigating the myriad of cultural differences and language barriers with the pilgrims from around the world, you learn things you otherwise never would in daily life.
With these experiences filling nearly every moment of your day, it is only after you return home that you can begin to unpack them.
So, this past week, sitting in my apartment, as my chin rested on the knuckles of my left hand, my eyes wandered to the discolored space left on my wrist to realize I was no longer wearing my watch.
Time is that which is manufactured by clocks - Herman Bondi
After countless struggles to track my walks in kilometers instead of miles, assuring my morning alarm would go off silently, and relearning simple math to understand a 24-hour clock, what was central to my daily success became an afterthought.
Yet, for all the ways I used my watch walking those 779 kilometers, rarely was it as a signal to leave the present moment.
It was in the absence of anticipation for what was next that I found my mind at ease.
Able to take a puff from its inhaler, my brain, body, and being were simultaneously unburdened by the past five years of life that had left me in the throes of exhaustion.
Walking 6–7 hours a day, The Camino becomes a temporal vacuum as it devours our routines and fixation on time.
Simply, there is time to wake up, time to eat, time to walk, time to rest, more time to walk, time to sleep.
The fixated idea of time as the numerical means to track the sun's position is not as real as it is in our daily lives.
Sure, time waits for no man, but man waits for no time.
It is in these moments devoid of time that the world seems to change its pace, and life seems to become a bit fuller.
The Brain Has No Clock, Why Do We?
Since 2001, Dr. Peter Ulric Tse of Dartmouth College's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences has done extensive research on how our minds seem to perceive certain moments longer than others.
In his research “Attention and the Subjective Expansion of Time” (2004) Dr. Tse explains how the mind, after being repeatedly exposed to similar stimuli, when presented with a low probability “oddball”, this outlier “tends to last subjectively longer than the high-probability stimulus even when they last the same objective duration” (Abstract).
Simply, when we experience the same things throughout our day, when an unlikely event occurs it lasts longer than all other events of that day.
Dr. David Eagleman, former neuroscience researcher in Baylor University's Labs and current professor at Stanford, in conjunction with Dr. Tse, worked to understand why this is.
In their research “Time and the Brain: How Subjective Time Relates to Neural Time” (2005), they found though we talk in terms of time, the brain has no internal clock.
Instead, each of our brains has a specific processing rate, and, when this processing rate is increased, we perceive a longer duration of time involved with that we are processing (Eagleman para. 5).
Consistent with Dr. Tse's original research, when we encounter the same events over and over, our brains enter autopilot: the effort needed to process is not high as we are accustomed to the task and its inputs.
However, at the moment an oddball is introduced, and we are forced to increase our processing speeds, our brains begin to perceive the additional work needed at that moment as a longer period of time passing.
So, are we Neo or Nah?
Kind of.
The keyword to this point has been perceive: we perceive time to slow down.
Think of it this way.
As our minds increase the processing needed to interact with the new, novel, oddball experience, this processing power engages our memory to a deeper, layered, second level of encoding that allows our recollection of these events to be more detailed (Stenson 2007 para. 19).
This is according to Dr. Eagleman and Dr. Chess Stetson in their research “Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event” (2007).
In essence, when we have experiences that lie outside our normal day-to-day, our minds engage in a way that forces our brains to pay deeper, more meaningful attention.
Moreover, these moments become core memories as we file them into away with far greater texture than those we are accustomed.
Time is suspended on The Camino.
The early weeks of my integration back into normal life from The Camino included many of the basics: unpacking, doing laundry, and the myriad of chores one does when gone for 6 weeks.
However, the weeks also included watching moves and playing video games, baking, cooking soups, calling friends and family, going to Sacred Music Concerts, as well as an impromptu post Mass brunch.
Similarly, for 34 days, when every day is it own self-contained experience with one real input, every experience that is not walking becomes an oddball.
When you walk for 6–7 hours a day, the conversation at the bodega, the rainbow skewed across the sky, the eye roll of a French woman upon hearing you are American, these all become memories stored in your mind at ultra 4k-hd.
Retelling these encounters, you can sit and peel back the layers of the experience, recalling exactly what happened as it happened, dictating it moment by moment as if you were right back in the thick of it.
The Technology Free Mindfulness Hack.
In 2020, over 7 million people downloaded apps to help them be mindful (Finances Online, 2024).
By 2025, the mindfulness app space is expected to have grown by 2.1 billion dollars (Finances Online, 2024).
We all crave the presence of mind to slow down time, yet far too many of us do not do the simple task of removing our watch.
Wearing a watch is an unconscious signal to yourself that whatever moment you currently are in, some other moment that is coming at a specified, known time, is more important.
We negate the possibility of the novel oddball in our daily lives by diverting our attention from the present, failing to fully engage with the newness before us, and instead focusing on some fictitious future.
Moreover, the future is stripped of its novelty as we prepare for it: we mentally step into scenarios before they even exist, rehearsing them in advance.
There are so many novel experiences we miss each day as we peer at our watch or lift our phones.
There are so many memories we leave behind because we choose to be slaves to our idiosyncratic routines that pacify and coddle our minds into a sullen state of safety in the form of a predictable routine.
Yes, there will always be moments where we truly need to know what time it is, as meetings and schedules are necessary.
I wager this is far less than we think.
Take off Your Watch.
Change the “Raise to Wake” Setting on Your Phone.
Keep clocks in spaces that are not readily visible.
Live in the Present Moment
I know box breathing, mantras, and various forms of stretching do benefit us, but I also know there are far easier steps to take.
Be open to what the day has to offer you by focusing on what is being offered to you in the exact moment you are in.
Nothing feels worse than sitting with someone, and you see them check their watch or ask what time it is because they have somewhere else to be.
So why are you wearing a watch or looking at the clock when you are alone: what are you telling yourself?
Eagleman, D. M., Tse, P. U., Buonomano, D., Janssen, P., Nobre, A. C., & Holcombe, A. O. (2005). Time and the brain: How subjective time relates to neural time. The Journal of Neuroscience, 25(45), 10369-10371. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3487-05.2005
Finances Online. (2024). 50 essential meditation statistics for 2024: Benefits, technology & practice data. Finances Online. Retrieved August 9, 2024, from https://financesonline.com/meditation-statistics/
Stetson, C., Fiesta, M. P., & Eagleman, D. M. (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event?. PloS one, 2(12), e1295. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001295
Tse, P. U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J., & Cavanagh, P. (2004). Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & psychophysics, 66(7), 1171–1189. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03196844
Comments