Instruction manual to think about time and not waste it

“I just returned from a long run along the river, and the moon was rising over the river. It was beautiful,” says writer Stefan Klein. He says it because to answer the question about how to deal with that awful feeling that time is slipping away from us, the certainty of our own finitude, that life is a countdown. Klein takes the opportunity to remember another author, Paul Bowles, who once wrote about the mistake of thinking that the moments of our lives repeat themselves. “How often do we experience a rising full moon, how often a special encounter? Five times, ten times? It’s not much,” he reflects. You have to appreciate every moment, perceive it in all its dimensions: it is the best way to deal with the passage of time. “By giving more life to our time, we give more time to our lives,” says Klein.

What Klein (Munich, 57 years old) preaches should not only be applied to individual moments (or as poetic as a twilight race), but also to medium and long-term planning. Example: the author always thought that he was not a good dancer. Now, close to becoming a sixty-year-old, he has signed up for salsa classes with his partner. That also counteracts the feeling of acceleration that often occurs as he ages. Novelty slows down: The more fresh information the brain processes, the longer a period seems in retrospect.

This German author, trained in Physics and Philosophy, has written Time. The secrets of our most precious asset (Peninsula). His book is not only about how to endure its passage, but about other aspects: the scientific perspective, the social dimension or the oddities of psychological time. Time is something that passes through us, something that we are made of (“we are the time we have left,” wrote Caballero Bonald), but that we do not fully understand. What is it? “If no one asks me, I know, or at least I imagine I know. But if I have to answer whoever asks me, I no longer know,” wrote Augustine of Hippo.

The time that science handles is strange: although the Newtonian perspective painted an absolute time external to the world that ran with a military pace, indifferent to everything else, the theory of relativity handles a time that slows down when we move at a certain speed or when we are within a gravitational field. In the tiny quantum world of subatomic particles, time, as we understand it, does not exist.

In the recently republished essay The order of time (Anagram) of the physicist Carlo Rovelli, the author reaches in an informative way to the theoretical depths of his discipline, quantum gravity (that which tries to combine Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, in principle incompatible). “The structure of time is not what it seems (…) I discovered it with astonishment in physics books, at the university. “Time works differently than how it appears to us,” Rovelli writes.

The clock of the mind

In addition to this equation time, there is psychological time, which “is one of the most sophisticated activities of our mind,” according to Klein. Almost all brain functions collaborate to generate it: the senses, memory, emotions, self-awareness. Disrupting any of these gears can cause the temporal machinery to become distorted or even disappear. Curiously, we have a biological clock, but it is not very precise, nor can we consult it. We have organs that can detect light or sounds, but none that accurately perceive time: if they ask us the time on the street, we have to look at the clock on the street. smartphone.

Sometimes the perception of time is related to movement. “That's why musicians automatically play faster when they breathe faster, and why tai chi masters can freeze their experience of time through extremely slow movements,” Klein says. When nothing happens for long periods, such as in a waiting room, time seems very long, but in a lively conversation it passes in a flash: the information accelerates the brain's perception of time.

Our perception of time also has cultural roots. Some indigenous people of the Andes, instead of conceptualizing the future as something that is ahead and the past as something that is behind, do it the other way around. It is not crazy: we have already seen the events of the past, but we are blind, with our backs turned, to the future. “The Aymara live according to this: since the future seems invisible to them, it is not worth devoting a single thought to it. If you ask them about tomorrow, they shrug. And they wait half a day for a bus or for a friend who does not arrive with an equanimity that is incredible to us,” explains Klein.

In the West the culture of time has also changed. It's not just that we live more and more quickly, it's that before the Industrial Revolution we faced time in a completely different way. It was the appearance of clocks in the bell towers that began to regulate work rhythms, governing local time in each town, or the need to regulate the arrivals and departures of trains by synchronizing times between towns, which brought us closer to our concept of a universal time that, even with its time zones, orders life on Earth (and which, by the way, Physics essentially denies).

The midlife crisis

Another way of experiencing time is our age. Middle age, the one in which we discover, with some surprise, that we are finite and that the end is there, on the horizon, is the topic of the recently republished essay In the middle of life (Asteroid Books), by British philosopher Kieran Setiya. Among various reflections on nostalgia, unfulfilled dreams or regret, a curious theory is discussed, that of the letter U. According to this, life would be like a U: its best moments occur at
the beginning, in childhood and, unexpectedly, in the end, in old age. The lowest point of the U is middle age, when we experience the aforementioned existential disappointments and are most overwhelmed by caring for children, elders, or work responsibilities. One piece of advice: “I have to learn how to be in the moment,” Setiya writes.

Although life may seem short, it is not so short, as Seneca points out in The brevity of life, which Herder is now republishing. The important thing is not to waste time on unimportant things or on useless suffering, as Stoic philosophy, so fashionable lately, preaches. It is necessary, for Seneca, to live focused on the present. An idea similar to those spread by Setiya and Klein: there is a certain consensus on the need to keep one's head short and live in the here and now.

The German also begins to assess another fundamental dilemma of well-being: is it preferable to have time or have money? Money goes a long way if you don't have your basic needs covered (see Maslow's pyramid). But once these are resolved, the difference is not that much. “The more money you have, the less each extra euro increases your happiness. In that case, money does not buy happiness: the more control people have over their time, the happier they are,” concludes the author.