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Our hours are numerous on this earth, but a real appreciation for most of those hours is rare. Our overemphasis on the productions of time and motion obscures the magic and spaciousness of the hours themselves, which are born again and again irrespective of whether they are worked or not. When we work only to do, we most often find ourselves helplessly doing again without having placed the first doing in any context, without having celebrated any accomplishment. One set of good figures can be replaced by another on the company ledger and the bottomless hunger of Wall Street still isn’t appeased, the investors still are unsatisfied, the media still are on the hunt for faults and cracks. What has been done is simply replaced by a new thing to be done. We lose the sense of music in our lives. It is as if a symphony, with all its rests, attenuated beats, and rhythms, suddenly had all silence between the notes removed, leaving the notes undifferentiated, crushed and bruised, each sound pressed into the next. Without silence, work isn’t music, but a mechanical hum, like an old refrigerator, the white noise corroding our attempts at a real conversation and noticed only in the reverberating kitchen, when it finally brings itself to a shuddering stop. We are each surrounded by an enormous silence that can be a blessing and a help to us, a silence in which the skein of reality is knitted and unraveled to be knit again, in which the perspectives of our work can be enlarged and enriched. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will. A silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds, which in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we haven’t yet investigated. Silence is the soul’s break for freedom.
Most people who exhibit mastery in a work or a subject often have left it completely for a long period, only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both us and the subject stale and uninteresting. Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. At speed, the world becomes a blur, and all those other lives we encounter that aren’t our own become another blur, too. Our hours of work and our traveling to work are getting longer and longer, but at the same time, in our perception those hours become shorter and shorter—short, abstract, and ungraspable. We speak of stealing time, as if it no longer belongs to us. We speak of needing time, as if it wasn’t around us already in every moment. We want to make time for ourselves, as if it were in our power to do so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present.
The commute is stop and go, stop and go, and, even in the smooth encapsulation of our car, we find it hard to ease ourselves into the world. We look out through the steady movement of the wipers clearing the rain methodically from our windshield and see hundreds of others all going the same somewhere through the same downpour, and all wanting to be somewhere other than this gray no-place. We press the accelerator and surge into the next moment, but already we are stopped again and want to be gone from all this stopping. We want to pass the car ahead, the hour ahead, the day ahead. When time is only for going and doing, then our bodies are slowly bred into the perception that life, and work itself, is a form of commute. The whole day is a traveling to and from, with the arrival rarely to be seen. The hours, we begin to feel, aren’t alive but something to be filled, done with, and then discarded. When we fall to bed exhausted, we almost always rise exhausted; how we enter the hours is how we emerge from them. Just as we tell ourselves we must take time for our relationship or marriage, we must encourage ourselves to take time for the marriage with time itself. Our marriage with time, especially in our work, is almost in the final stages of complete divorce, and is the cause of as many individual tragedies as the breakdown of a real flesh and blood marriage. The endpoint is the same. Cast out from the luxuriant friendship and ease of the hours we feel a blankness, a sameness, an aloneness, a lack of sense to all our doings and even our accomplishments. We attend the hushed memorial service for a dead friend and find the list of his achievements moves no one in the assembly, but the atmosphere does quicken in the crowded room when his daughter speaks of all the many things he loved and everything and everyone he held in his affections. The dogs, the chopping of wood, the homemade telescopes, the sunsets seen from the porch, his daughter’s children, the jokes that enlivened the long meetings at work. There is laughter, surprise, revelation. Suddenly we know whom we have lost, as if identity, in the great measuring moment of its loss, is based only on what we have loved and held in our affections, while all the rest is chaff to be blown away by the arrival of death. Love is the measure of identity, because in love is the timeless and untrammeled, the presence of things, the hours illuminated and celebrated like the steeple bell across the fields, filling the hollows and the hot afternoon to the brim. Death taps us on the shoulder and asks us to encapsulate a life by its loves. Death isn’t impressed by what we have done, unless what we have done leaves a legacy of life; death’s tide washes over everything we have taken so long to write in the sand. What is remembered in all our work is what is still alive in the hearts and minds of others.
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