This essay was originally published by the Damaris Project: an Internet salon on spirituality and culture
The Violence of Rushing
By Valerie Andrews
At the height of the technology boom, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs gathered to consider the impact of the Internet on American culture. The conference was aptly called “Speed.com,” and philosopher Sam Keen was the keynote speaker. Ever the iconoclast, Keen threw a plastic clock on the floor and stomped on it. The audience roared in approval, indicating their distaste for the 24/7 schedule and the kind of constant rushing that made them rich yet destroyed the natural rhythm of their lives.
The high-tech boom is over. But most of us are still so overworked and overtired, we have enough rage in us to murder time. In a court of law, we might claim self-defense. When we live by the tyranny of the clock, experts say, we become irritable and inefficient. The country suffers from an epidemic of anxiety and depression, and the national tab goes up for stress-related illnesses. In short, we want to kill time because it’s killing us.
I can well imagine myself in the dock, making such a plea. In the 1990s, I worked as a journalist, filing 15 stories a week on everything from artificial intelligence to the genetic code, and I also founded an institute to help people deal with life transitions. Soon I was logging a 60-hour week and traveling cross-country while renovating a house with my fiancé and auditioning for the role of step-mom to a 6-year-old. For months, I ignored the symptoms of burn-out—headaches, blurred vision, sleeplessness. Then one day, on my way to work, I tripped over the front stoop, wrenching a muscle in my ankle and injuring both knees. The unconscious knows when we need to adjust our sense of time—it will bring us to a grinding halt through accidents or illness if we do not slow down of our own accord.
Cheater Time
While recovering from my accident, I came across the following story about our need to embrace a different kind of time.
An English archaeologist hired two African porters for a ten-day expedition across the burning desert. The group arrived at their destination after several grueling days of dust and heat. The Englishman headed for his hotel while the porters set up camp at the edge of town.
The Englishman asked, “Why don’t you go home? The journey’s over and you’ve been paid.”
“Our bodies have traveled a good distance,” they replied. “Now we must wait here for our souls to catch up.”
Too many of us neglect that inner clock. Instead we’ve fallen prey to the dangerous fantasy that we can outwit “that old bald cheater, Time.” In the process, we drive ourselves to achieve and push beyond our natural limits. The average European takes four weeks’ vacation every summer, an additional week at Christmas and another week at Easter. Americans take off an average of two weeks a year, and according to the United Nations Health Report, suffer more from stress-related illnesses than their continental counterparts.
Studies show that U.S. employees yearn for more control of their daily schedules. Yet instead of flexible hours, American corporations are offering valet services to take care of shopping and dry cleaning, find a baby-sitter—even secure rest homes for our ailing parents. The message is, “We’ll handle your life so you can spend more time at the office.” Perhaps we should counter with a request for enough time off at a clip to get into a completely different, and therefore renewed, frame of mind.
Big Time
For most of human history, humanity has been floating in a dimension so fathomless it reaches back into the past “time immemorial” and into the future unknown. Sometimes called “wild time,” this mysterious dimension connects us with the matrix of the living world and is embedded in our genetic code. It includes cosmic time, which produced the stars and planets; geological time, which forged the oceans and the continents; the Ur-time of pre-recorded history; the blueprint of the future and the fundamental laws of growth and change.
The Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung said we each have two personalities. One of these personalities is grounded in clock time and the other in what Jung might have called Big Time, just as he referred to life-changing dreams as “Big Dreams.” Jung further suggested that these personalities have different roles. Personality number one is concerned with accumulating wealth and status. It’s good at analyzing the competition, making lists and setting goals. It is key to the running of a household and the management of one’s career. In contrast, personality number two connects us with our dreams and our intuition, and gives us clues to the underlying nature of reality. Jung believed our most important insights come from number two. He compared it to “entering a temple … when one looks down on creation simultaneously with God.” This Big Time is the basis of Genesis and all of our creation stories.
Today, personality number one clearly dominates our lives. It provides a task for every second of the day; yet this busy-ness has a price. The Utne Reader noted recently that most Americans are moving so fast they no longer have the time for the things that matter most, friendship, languid and unhurried conversation or spontaneous adventures.
How can we reverse the trend and encompass Big Time? Here is some advice from the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, a 2,500-year-old document that explores the nature of time. If we wish to have an influence for the good, the I Ching says, we must limit our field of activity. Without carefully monitoring and restricting the way we spend our energy, it further insists, we lose both our peace of mind and our concentration, and ultimately fritter ourselves away.
This is a revolutionary message. Postmodern life, with all its opportunities and temptations, makes it hard to follow the I Ching ’s advice. A physician works long hours and on vacations volunteers for UNICEF. A college professor is making a film about better teaching methods in his spare time. A landscape architect works pro bono to build parks and trails in developing countries. We talk about our need for time out and self-renewal, yet too often we fill our empty time with more activities.
Untamed Time
Thomas Merton warned that even when we are working for the highest good, we do violence to ourselves. “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence,” he said. “The rush and pressure of modern life are perhaps the most common form [of it]—to allow oneself to be carried way by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything.”
So to be controlled, even by our desire to accomplish good, is a form of spiritual arrogance? The answer is yes. When we’re rushed, we’re ego-centered. We dare to tell Life exactly what we’re going to do with it. We view the world through Blake’s “single vision.” But when we surrender to Big Time, Life talks back. It teases us with innuendo and suggestion. It wags its finger and says, “Come here and I’ll show you a mystery.”
When we hurry—in our work, our activism, our personal lives—we lose touch with the ineffable. When we enter Big Time, we connect with the untamed and unnameable, all of life’s potential yet to be released. We owe ourselves a taste of it each day, whether we take ten minutes for morning meditation, take a walk in nature at midday, or, just before retiring, enter that twilight state where we muse upon the larger rhythms of our lives.