It is 6:31 of 11 January 2015 as I begin to write this. Some days ago, I read “Year’s End” by Jhumpa Lahiri (The New Yorker, 24 Dec 2007) and an article written by a young lawyer who took time off from his profession to be a stay-at-home dad [“What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Me About Being a Stay-at-Home Dad” Ryan Park, The Atlantic (2015)]. Thanks to the holidays, I was also able to watch a Theory of Everything, a biographical film of sorts on the life of Stephen Hawking. All three works jolted me in different ways. “Year’s End” dealt with grief from the passing of a loved one, and how those left behind cope. Park’s article essentially argued how gender distinctions and gender-based laws operate against everyone – father, mother, children and the society-at-large. And a Theory of Everything was a succinct exposition of Hawking’s struggles and of his wonderful life. It’s now 6:48 and I’ve only managed to reach this point of the piece which I had in mind. Six hours and forty eight minutes and God knows how many seconds since I turned 38. Probably (though I doubt it) because I just hit 38, I’ve tried to re-view these three works and what they say on the subject of time. They each, in part at least, proceed from the concept of time as currency: we trade our time for those we value. That concept, I now realize, is powerful. For humans, time is a finite resource. We are constrained by our lifespan, divided and broken down into decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds and so on. The finiteness of this resource is often taken for granted, especially in times of relative peace and comfort; but where our survival is at stake, we fight or flee in an attempt to prolong our time alive. Unfortunately, we usually give little thought to what we do with this resource. Most of us follow the life map drawn by societal consensus: we get education, find work, marry, raise our family. We usually spend our entire lifetime to these usual ends. Of course, a few brave or imprudent souls chart their own, re-allocating a huge chunk of their time to some important, social changing, worthy cause or experiment, or otherwise to eyebrow-raising idle endeavor. But everyone, knowingly or unknowingly, set objectives and targets, whether long or short term. We prioritize, subliminally aware that if our time runs out, those at the bottom will have to be done by someone else, or worse, not done at all. We allocate our time precisely because it is not bottomless. We spend our time, with our and others’ knowledge, skill and energy and convert them into some tangible or intangible accomplishment from where we derive our personal satisfaction. This drive for personal fulfilment given the finiteness of time is what defines not only our choices in life, but our character as well. We are compelled to choose because our time is limited. We choose with relative care what to study, what to do for work, who to be with, our partner, our friends, etc. with the nagging feeling that we do not have time for everything. With immortality, there is no limitation to our choices, not even poverty. The same is true with the virtues we extol (or at least attempt or want to extol). An act of patience or kindness costs us time: five minutes of waiting or helping, or of trying to be less hurtful, is five minutes taken away from an important task, or a much-deserved “me-time.” And while innate nature may largely explain our attitude and character, our choice of how to manifest outwardly our response to any stimuli – with empathy, insensitivity, or to outrightly ignore it – involves an unconscious calculation of the time we forego for other things. The finiteness of our time is not merely the very definition of our own mortality; it is also the test and measure of our individual character as a person, and of our humanity as a collective. Because our time is finite, we are compelled to make choices: for what, and for whom, we choose to spend our time – and how – defines who and what we are. It is now 8:45 a.m. of 11 January 2015, and this has taken more than two hours of my time.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 01:03:30 +0000