Six Ways to Stretch Time

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” – Henry David Thoreau

Here in the Pacific Northwest the tree-leaves that haven’t yet fallen are burning bright with reds and yellows. Over the last several weeks twilight has come on noticeably earlier, and with our clocks now turned back an hour, we find ourselves in full tilt toward the year’s shortest days and longest nights.

As deep autumn alters the structure of my weeks ahead, time is much on my mind. So I thought I’d offer a few simple if occasionally offbeat ideas for “stretching” time — not, mind you, in the quantitative sense of maximizing productivity, but in the qualitative sense of remembering and appreciating how rich and deep with life every fleeting hour can be if one seeks one’s fulfillment in each.

1. Log-Off, Disconnect, Unplug

In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts makes an important point about the nature of time:

‘Duration’ is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing. Until quite recently, people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration time. Time not artificially broken, but shaped around natural rhythmic cycles, time bound to the integrated functioning of the senses, the perceptions. We have destroyed that duration… We have fractured the flow of time…into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price.

Given the way our ultra-connected, online existences splinter time into frantic parcels, one’s first and most reliable method of stretching time these days is to switch off one’s devices in favor of analog reality, to become electronically inaccessible, to deliberately remove oneself from the pixellated up-to-the-minute what’s-new-what’s-now? hubbub, and step back into the true Now of the natural world.

In other words, whenever possible choose solitary introspection over information acquisition, or face-to-face interaction over hyper-connectivity.

And once offline, consider each of the following.

2. Travel, or Just Go Someplace New to You

We’ve all experienced a certain strange sensation while walking up a path and back in a place we’d never been before: Always, on that first outbound walk the path seems much longer than it does on the return.

A similar thing happens, on a larger scale, when one travels — especially when one travels abroad. While plunged amid a different culture, and perhaps surrounded by an alien language, each week can seem a month, each month a year, and each year a lifetime in its own right.

In traveling, or just going someplace new, one puts oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where one’s senses and imagination are stimulated to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in everyday life. This has a profound time-stretching effect. In the thick of business as usual, on the other hand, one’s response to the world is largely habitual, and through the lens of habit time seems only to grow more scarce.

Try it. Go away and think nothing of a homecoming. Go as one likes to go by the sea in the night, farther and farther out under the many silent stars. Try it. –Rainer Maria Rilke

3. Undertake a New Project Whose End Is Nowhere in Sight

Write a novel (no outlines allowed). Research your genealogy. Bond with a child. Volunteer at your community center or library or local tree-planting organization.

This point relates to my previous one, for the activities I just mentioned call for a new, often imaginative disposition. Each is an undertaking bound to break up routines of thought and behavior, and thus to take one out of one’s own customary sense of time.

4. Read Books About Other People’s Lives (Fiction and Non)

A wise and inspiring teacher (who happens to be my wife) puts it this way for her students:

We read to live a thousand lives with the one we’re given.

What could I possibly amend?

5. People-Watch

This is one of my favorite activities. I park myself at a busy spot (in my car or on a bench) and simply observe the various characters strolling or hurrying past, getting coffee, exercising their dogs, chasing after toddlers, waiting for the bus, etc.

The time-stretching benefits of people-watching are much like reading. Again, it’s all about exploring one’s own imaginative capacities.

I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse*

6. Meditate

This one’s probably obvious. But many people are unsure about what meditation really is. Think of it, if you like, as sitting and doing nothing — but remember that it’s got to be unadulterated inactivity accompanied by presence of mind, which is a very different state from the vacant passivity arrived at while, say, watching TV. Meditation, as I recommend it, means centering one’s focus upon one’s own pulse and breath, thinking about nothing else in particular. It means removing oneself from all stimuli save the flow of time.

It is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. – Charles Lamb

My previous two suggestions, reading and people-watching, could be understood as more active forms of meditation — but how often these days does one consciously free oneself to do nothing at all, to exist for a while fully separate (and still awake) from all pressing matters and all noise? To do so is to return to a core, and to bask in what Birkerts calls “deep time.”

I suspect that this kind of sitting meditation is today, more than ever, confused with — and avoided as — boredom. But really, boredom, at least as we often mean the term, is the opposite of meditation, for unlike meditation, boredom itself does nothing to renew and enliven the soul’s rich sense of time and time’s elasticity. (This fine article in The Boston Globe, however, makes a good case for reassessing boredom’s benefits).

Here’s a final word for today on the subject of boredom, time, and time-stretching, written some eighty years ago by the great German novelist Thomas Mann:

What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When every day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. …We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. **

*Hesse translation by James Wright

**Mann translation by John E. Woods

(This is a renascent post from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

You might also enjoy:

“Let Us Begin”

“When Time Stopped”

“The Heroic Journey”

“On Slowness”

“Why ‘Time Management’ is Nonsense”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“The Art of Looking Deeply”

“Time to Give In, Time to Give Up”

“A Hymn to the Library“