Hour by hour. Day by day. We measure down to the second. We live by the minute. Never before has the history of civilization been as closely tracked as it is today. Digital calendars, algorithm-enhanced watches, virtual assistants pushing us from event to meeting to task. Our conception of time, and by extension space, is shaped by our interactions with technology.
“…no two cultures live conceptually in the same kind of time and space,” writes Lewis Mumford, the cultural historian and prophetic voice who best captured the development and technology and civilization up to the Computer Age. Our ideas about what time is differ greatly from those cultures not inundated with notifications, schedules, and maximization. Time is money, money is power. Versus time at the heart of existence.
At the beginning of all Jewish philosophy, time is one, eternal. Its division into seven days saw six become subservient to the one set aside for Shabbat Shalom (Sabbath peace). It taught Hebraic minds of the primacy of time over space. Abraham Joshua Heschel aids us: “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments…” Money, power, and information are not the ultimate ends by which we “utilize” time. An architecture is created of time that encapsulates moment, experience, and encounter.
This too differs from certain indigenous people’s view of time. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains, “Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself… all things that were will come again.” Gratitude defines a culture in this conception of a time that returns to itself. When all the world is a gift in motion, your schedule becomes an open hand, waiting to give back as much as you receive.
The newest American experiment has been about reengineering our lives to a new kind of time. One defined by the habits of adding and saving time, closing it within boxes and looking to remove the constraints of “lesser hours” spent. It becomes a commodity to be spent, not a gift to be experienced.
The trouble with this paradigm, as is always the problem with deeply ingrained ways of thinking, it its end. The only logical conclusion of commoditizing time is commoditizing relationships, work, and our planet. A pernicious worldview takes hold; the unconscious habits therein are impossible to excise without first drawing out the demonic thought patterns rooted deep (“demonic” in our insensate desire to gain the power of gods without the love, prudence, and discipline of gods). Wendell Berry agrees in his exhortation that we must, “begin by giving up any idea that we can bring about these healings without fundamental changes in the way we think and live.”
The language of “spending time” and “earning an hour” must cease to so profoundly shape us. Our practice of treating time as a tool must make way for a restoration of time as sacredly cyclical, eternally evocative. Humanity’s hope is in the splendor of Sabbath, the blessing of a gift economy, and the restoration of time in the natural order of things.
We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things…
