Thinking about time

In our market-based economy, “time is money”. How we spend our time is often dictated by our financial needs, our jobs, and our winner-takes-all economy. We find ourselves striving to use our time for money-earning work. This leaves little room for self-examination or awareness of the preciousness of time.

On the contrary, the ancient Stoics urge us to stop and think about time. In his letter On Saving Time, Seneca wrote: “What person can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he or she is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death. The major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years are behind us are already in death’s hands. …. Hold every hour in your grasp…. While we are postponing, life speeds on. Nothing is ours except time.”

As Seneca tells it, the ultimate test is whether we find uses of time that seem worthwhile in the face of our mortality.

Our ability to live according to nature

And I’d add another wrinkle here, too: Our drive towards money-earning pursuits also separates us from our ability to live “according to nature” in a Stoic sense. It distances us from our calling towards human excellence in an abstract sense, and towards the very concrete and material needs right in front of us. I’m reminded of a favourite poem by William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; – Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not…

But perhaps all is not lost. In the pandemic, I believe, there’s been something of a revolution in people’s thinking about how we spend and use time. We have been forced to confront our mortality full-on as the disease raged and killed thousands – the true momento mori that comes during a deathly crisi – and many people lost loved ones far too soon.

As the world shut down, we saw the sweeping away of all that normally kept us aimlessly busy out in the world. We were able to step outside ourselves and observe our work lives as the overwhelmingly hectic pursuits that they are, and to think about what that meant for our use of time. Many people responded by changing the way they spend time, where they spend their days (moving to new states, cities, and towns, sometimes away from large metropolitan areas and towards the countryside), and how they work. This included the Great Resignation, in which many folks decided to change their work lives entirely.

Our time is limited

We have acknowledged that time is limited and that something can come along at any point to upend our world and our plans for the time we think (hope?) that we have. So in some ways, people have become more circumspect about the use and misuse of time – at least until we get caught up again in “getting and spending,” of time, money, and of time that equates to money.

How should we use our time?

But how should we use our time – or at least some part of it, that we can take for ourselves – wisely? In my opinion, it’s quite individual, as long as it has something to do with building our character and striving towards the virtues. It’s an opportunity to define your own principles and values, and find ways to use your time to achieve them.

Let me be clear that how we spend time shouldn’t just be focused on constant “productivity” – we all need rest time, time to recover, think, meditate, contemplate. Time to regroup and relax our bodies and minds. Rest time is proven to put us in a mindset of creativity that can re-energize us. Just look at research studies and books pointing to that fact, including Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

Even though we may set differing goals for our time, what I think we can all agree on is that we should try, individually, to examine how we spend it. And this is where journaling can make a difference.

The habit of writing down

If we could get into the habit of writing down how we spent our day, and asking ourselves if we used our time well, that would be a mindful way of reminding ourselves to stay aware of time’s value and how we’re employing it. In this way, the ancient Stoic practice of reviewing our day could help us, centuries later, keep track of our choices about our most precious resource: time.

Meredith Kunz is author of The Stoic Mom Substack and Blog https://thestoicmom.substack. com. Website: www.thestoicmom.com. On Twitter @thestoicwoman

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