Life before clocks
It is hard to imagine a life without a watch.
It’s even harder to imagine a life without any time-keeping device at all.
But in the scope of human history, that is how most humans have lived—until the rather recent invention of the mechanical clock in 1283. Interestingly, Christians created the first clock. Monks in the monasteries were motivated to keep track of time in order to mark the canonical hours (or fixed hours of prayer).
We think the invention of the smart phone was a big deal. But think about being able to see time pass for the first time. Perhaps no other invention created such a profound shift in our phenomenology—the way we experience the world. As Neil Postman notes in Technopoly, every time a new technology is introduced—whether it’s the clock, the television, or the smartphone—it changes everything.
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.
With the invention of the clock, it was not Europe plus the clock. It was an entirely new Europe.
The Shift
So what, exactly, happened? We moved from a culture that marked time by events, to a culture that marked time by the clock. Before the clock, time was measured by light and by season.
It was “time to get up” when the sun rose.
It was “time to go to bed” when the sun went down.
It was “time to eat lunch” when the sun was high in the sky.
These times shifted based on the season. In the monasteries, “evening prayer” took place earlier in the winter than it did in the summer.
John Swinton summarizes the shift well: “events no longer shape time; time shapes events.” Now, cart comes before the horse. And this is not a morally neutral shift; the clock now determines our values. It determines what we we feel is “worth our time” or not. It determines how long we can (or should) afford to spend on something—or someone.
Like the Vecna-Clock in “Season Four” of Stranger Things, the clock controls—and haunts—us.
Atypical experiences of time
Among Christians, there has been a renewed interest in time—probably because no one feels like they have any. On the one hand, there are voices calling us to “stewardship”—which sometimes feels like a way of sprinkling holy water on the secular values of “efficiency” or productivity. On the other end are voices calling us to eliminate hurry, with an innumerable number of books written on the Sabbath.
But the reason I treasure John Swinton’s book Becoming Friends of Time (and will continue to quote and glean from it here) is because it highlights atypical experiences of time. It highlights the experiences of people who cannot be driven by the clock—either because they cannot move at the speed of modern society, or because they are not aware of “clock-time” at all. These are not people in the rat race telling other people how to “opt out” of the rat race—these are people for whom the rat race isn’t an option.
For example, Swinton quotes the British theologian John Hull, who went blind when he was in his 50s—and as a result of his blindness, experienced a dramatic shift in his experience of time:
(My colleague) tells me that he thinks my perception of time has undergone a change since I lost my sight. HE thinks that of all the people in the faculty I am the only one who always seems to have plenty of time. Everyone else is rushing around, chasing their tails, trying to cram every minute with necessary tasks and to squeeze the last drop out of time. I alone seem to have all the time in the world…I just go on, doing what has to be done, until it’s finished. It does not matter how much time it takes.
This is fascinating. The man with the disability is the only one who has plenty of time. The man who cannot see the clock is the only one not driven by it. It begs the question—who exactly is more disabled? The man suffering from blindness, or his friends suffering from their busy-ness?
Hull relates another story about a friend with restricted mobility, who as a result, could never travel more than a mile from his house each day:
He once told me that it took him three-quarters of an hour to tie up his shoe-laces. “Heavens!” I said. “That’s a long time!” My friend replied that he did not think of it as a long time; that was just how long it took to tie his shoe-laces.
Imagine having to take forty-five minutes to tie your shoes. But what is fascinating is that this is a man living in event-time. Time, for him, isn’t measured by the clock, but by the task. It’s not 9 AM; it’s time to tie his shoes.
The man with blindness is the only one who has plenty of time. The man who cannot see the clock is therefore the only one not driven by it. It begs the question, who exactly is more debilitated? The man suffering from blindness, or his friends suffering from busy-ness?
Time is how long it takes…
So, imagine a life without clocks.
The reality is that it’s hard to do. There’s no going back. We are important people with important things to do. We have jobs, schools, sports practices, and dinner reservations. We have planes to catch—and they leave when the clock says it’s time.
But it is worth learning from those whose lives are still shaped by events. And it is worth asking: what tasks in my life could I grant the freedom to take as long (or as short) as they take?
One such task is breastfeeding—it takes as long as it takes. My wife is breastfeeding our youngest son right now. He is full when he’s full, and ready to go back to sleep sleep when he’s ready to go back to sleep (and no sooner). This is event-time.
Or think about reading the Bible. Should I set a timer on how long I read each morning? Maybe—especially if there are other people to love, or vocational tasks to do, I shouldn’t be spending four hours. But maybe sometimes I don’t?
Parents: what about playing with the kids? Chesterton was right: kids want to do the same thing “again” and “again”. That’s event-time. Maybe we should do it again sometimes.
Play eliminates the clock. It’s why golf and tennis and baseball—sports without a clock—feel more timeless. When I still had knees (and, um, time), I remember playing pick-up-basketball. There’s nothing better than “running it back”: you finish a game, and the score was close, and the teams were fair—so you grab water and say “let’s run it back”. Event-time.
Sabbath is perhaps the last remnant of event-time. In the Jewish tradition, it is still sundown to sundown. I’m not here to be your Sabbath police. But there is no debating that Sabbath is an invitation back into event-time, or what Swinton calls time without anxiety. In Sabbath, you once more have all the time in the world—which sounds like…heaven.