Imagine a flowering plant. A baking cake. A rising stock price. A healing wound. Time passing can be a beautiful thing.
Why then does the cartoon above resonate so deeply with us? Is it our fear of mortality? Our never-ending list of to-dos and things left undone that haunt us moment-to-moment? Are we as a culture, as a species, doomed to brood on the past, fear the future, and run away from the present?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies our sense of time scarcity as a leading source of stress in the United States — a primary cause of heart disease, our number one killer. Meanwhile, growing positive psychology research demonstrates the healing power of being in the present.
What if our relationship with time shifted? What if we began to view time as a source of inspiration instead of dread? What if each glance at the watch put us more in the moment, made us feel more focused, centered and alive? Few realize that our modern timekeeping system is fundamentally arbitrary. Hours, minutes and seconds have no home in cosmology, but rather the digits of our hands.
Technology is evolving as we speak to put smartphones on our wrists. The era of smartwatches with heart rate sensors and real-time monitoring systems is dawning upon us. With processing powers greater than the earliest mainframes and NASA spaceships embedded into our timepieces, we are no longer compelled to settle for a construct of time rooted in hand gestures, ropes and rocks. What if we, as a community of innovators and healers, took the first step in evolving our modern-day answer to the age-old question, what time is it?
Mindfulness & Innovations in Timekeeping
The mindfulness community actually has a long and storied track record of innovation in timekeeping, centered around spiritual observations, holidays, rites, rituals, meditation and prayer:
32,000 BCE — Cave art found in France and Germany depicts lunar and seasonal cycles of the heavens, representing the first known calendaring system.
4,200 BCE — Ancient Egyptians calculate 365 days between alignments of the sun and Sopdet, goddess of Sirius the Dog Star, marking the Nile’s concurrent flooding and enrichment of the soil.
3,000 BCE — Stonehenge in modern-day England demarcates the annual winter and summer solstices, serving as burial grounds and a venue of ancestor worship and rituals.
2,400 BCE — The first known clocks are the shadow clocks, or obelisks, of ancient Egypt, erected by clerics in pairs at temple entrances for ritual observances.
2,100 BCE — Assyrians, Sumerians and Babylonians establish twelve phases of the moon, or moonths, per lunar calendar year.
1,000 BCE — Egyptian clerics develop water clocks, or clepsydras, to continue tracking proper timing of rituals throughout the night.
100 BCE — Chinese, Korean and Japanese Buddhist monks advance incense timers to replace candle clocks. Utilizing various scents, one smells the time change.
1200–1300 AD — Benedictine monks of Western Europe become the first clockmakers of the region and create the mechanical clock.
1582 AD — Pope Gregory XIII spearheads the Gregorian calendar widely used today.
The Origins of Tic-Toc
The divisions of years, months and days are rooted in cosmological events and account for consistent measurements across disconnected cultures. Subdivisions of weeks, hours, minutes and seconds, however, are largely arbitrary and varied more greatly throughout history.
Weeks have ranged from 3 to 13 days depending on prevailing leadership and religious tradition. Decimal time was used by China throughout much of its history and resurfaced in 1998 when Swatch proposed Internet Time of 1000 beats per day.
The sexagesimal system which lies at the heart of our modern-day tic-toc was similarly devised for convenience, not scientific truth. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians used sixty as a mathematical base due to its ease of counting with two hands.
The Problems with Tic-Toc
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn presents a valuable anecdote from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program he developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center:
Linda described feeling as if a large truck were always right on her heels, driving just faster than she can walk.
In the modern age, feeling overwhelmed and out-of-sync is an increasingly common experience. Heart disease is real, heart attacks are real, and time scarcity is a chronic stressor.
One of the central tenets of mindfulness-based stress reduction is to encourage patients to adopt the present moment.
Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.
The ancient Greeks embraced two definitions of time. Chronos described sequential time. Kairos translated more closely to the eternal moment in which everything actually happens.
In 2010, Science published a Harvard study showing our minds are focused on the past or future 46.9% of the day, leading directly to poorer mood.
Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness.
The tic-toc almost by definition puts us in a sequential frame of mind rather than in the moment.
The streaming of water, passing of a shadow or burning of a flame became replaced by the now familiar tic-toc. With the Industrial Revolution, time became money and the clock became the archetypal model for the industrial era.
Albert Einstein later demonstrated that time itself is relative:
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
In the 1950s, University of Minnesota biologist Franz Halberg coined the term circadian, from the Latin for around a day. We now know that every cell in our body has some awareness of the time of day.
Poor circadian rhythms are linked to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and mental health disorders.
Our hyper-connected culture makes many of us social-shift workers, exposed to blue light late into the night and shifting our hormones into dangerous patterns.
Introducing Lub-Dub
The arbitrariness of our current timekeeping method, combined with the fact that it fosters a stressful mindset, presents an opportunity to improve.
Consider your daily routine: wake up, meditate, eat breakfast, drive to work, work, eat lunch, go for a walk, cook dinner, spend time with family, relax and sleep. Most of these milestones repeat daily.
Harvard physicist and historian Peter Galison defines clocks accordingly:
We’re always looking for things that repeat, over and over again… and that repetition, that cycle of things, forms a clock.
What if our cadence became linked to breakfast time and exercise time rather than a mechanical construct beneath it? In essence, we become our own clocks. Lub-dub.
Chronobiology research tells us that intuitive daily milestones such as meals, exercise and socializing are biological zeitgebers — environmental cues that synchronize our internal rhythms.
These rhythms influence sleep-wake cycles, hormone secretion, blood pressure, digestion, alertness, mood and reaction times.
Timothy Monk, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Sleep Medicine Institute, explains:
Behavioral circadian rhythms related to the timing of sleep, meals, work and social interactions are just as valid circadian rhythms as the physiological ones.
Nutrition, sleep, exercise and social connection are now considered foundational lifestyle vital signs linked to long-term health outcomes.
What if our timekeeping tools accounted for stress physiology and circadian science? What if they optimized schedules, discouraged high-stress meetings during vulnerable periods, or surfaced calming imagery at the right moments?
Now time becomes something we can control, design, manipulate and relate to according to our personal biology, desires and needs.
A universal timekeeping system would still need to exist beneath it. Meetings must still be coordinated and train crashes prevented. But perhaps we can evolve from this generalized base into a more individualized concept of time that inspires and heals rather than stresses and reduces.
As physicists and engineers continue refining the mechanics of timekeeping, perhaps it is equally important that human health and well-being remain part of the equation.
Originally published on January 4, 2021 on cih.ucsd.edu/mindfulness.