By Lisa Baker
Some of the very best moments of my year have been running with Malia. She’s my daughter, 10 years old and coltish, limby and awkward, ankles poking out of her pants, her foot already a women’s size nine. But she’s all-girl, too—breathless and silly, amused by her sister’s potty humor and still willing to snuggle. “Wanna go for a run, honey?” I say to her after school, and she says, “Sure,” every time. Running had become a tedious routine, the washed-up athlete in me needing to hold on to the daily run, an efficient way to keep in shape, to claim a little for me at the end of a day spent on others. Mr. Chung had always said, “But just wait, you’ll turn 40 and your knees will start hurting,” and by the time they did in December, I had already contemplated giving up running altogether in favor of the midlife fast-walk so popular with suburban women.
But then Malia says, “Sure,” and we tie on our running shoes, head out, and as soon as we leave the driveway, she starts talking: “Today at school Danny said that bad word and Cody laughed, and Mom, I think my body’s changing the way you said it would, and why won’t you please let me read The Hunger Games?” I could take the time now to reprimand her about this morning’s bad behavior, when she flipped out about her knotted hair, when she harangued her baby sister for crayoning on her homework, but I don’t, because I am intoxicated with her. With each step, my head sings, “She’s all mine, she’s all mine, she’s all mine,” knowing that down the road, around the corner, she won’t be mine. She’ll be someone’s employee, someone’s lover, someone’s mother, no longer mine—not like this. I could take the time now to warn her, “You know, someday you’ll have bigger than knotted-hair problems. Someday your heart will break. Someday you might feel like you’ve got to wear this and behave like that to be the kind of girl other people want,” but I don’t, because I’m intoxicated with her, her spastic stride, her once-in-a-while need to walk, to smell that low-hanging fl ower, to kick the stone in our path. Now, my knees don’t hurt. Now, I don’t even know I’m running, and I have to swallow down the catch in my throat that says, “But there’s not enough time.”
We never have enough time. How many times a day do we say, “I’d love to, but I just don’t have the time”? Worse, how many times do we commit to something, knowing that we’ll never give it the time we’d like, the time it deserves?
Within my own discipline, across centuries of literature, our struggle with time is alive and well: It drives character conflict; it determines structure; it writes theme. Maybe you remember the visiting writer Rick Moody and his repeated line, “Boys enter the house. Boys enter the house,” from his story “Boys,” which collapses a family’s lifetime into a few pages, exposing the elasticity of time: how a life lived feels instant and interminable at once. I hope you’ve read Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which reveals, through the ghost Beloved’s graphic haunting, our psychological experience of time—how vigorously the past can penetrate and occupy the present. And just last week for the first time, I read Tomas Tranströmer, the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in poetry. His translated prose poem “The Nightingale in Badelunda” reminds us of how time, if we are lucky, might but for a moment disappear altogether. The final lines read, “Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tockthankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe.”
But time doesn’t really disappear, our growing up irrefutable proof of its forward march, and our individual maturation marked by a deepening sense of how ultimately temporary our physical lives are. When we individuals assemble into cultures, a dominant view of time emerges; how a culture views and spends time profoundly impacts how we live.
Let me try to detail this. Child psychologist Michael Thompson, author of many books, including the New York Times best seller Raising Cain, spoke to Lower School parents last fall. Twenty years ago, he noted, American children had, on average, twenty more hours of free time per week. My own childhood, probably much like the childhoods of most of the adults in this room, was indeed filled with free, open-ended, unscripted time. My mother would kick us out of the house at the beginning of a summer day, and we would stumble back when the streetlights came on. With our neighborhood gang, we raced bikes, built tree houses, wrote and performed plays, constructed massive snow forts—all of the activity decided by us, and left totally unmonitored by adults.
Thompson’s research has found that most of the free time that so many of us once enjoyed is now consumed by organized town sports, run by adults and largely for adults. Likely, there are a host of good reasons why we adults fill your time these days with sports, with lessons and camps, with structured play dates, with opportunities you might not discover or have access to if left to your own devices, but in doing so, we take away something else: the chance for you to choose how to fill your own time. As a coach of my daughter’s soccer team, I’m totally implicated. But in the very moment I race my children out the door to make a practice time, I’m aware that I’m robbing them of something critical to their development as fully autonomous people: free time in which to screw up or to discover a passion, free time to sit and watch a day pass, free time to practice spending free time.
In other words, how our culture teaches its children to spend time—how we teach you—has changed in very recent history. So, too, has our life pace. Increasingly, no news to you, we Americans, adults and children, run ourselves ragged with busy-ness—and for most of us, this raggedness is precisely the mark of a day well lived, a measure of significant productivity. We log the hours. We punch the clock. Counter-intuitively, technology, for all its immense value, hasn’t helped Americans work less or slow down. In fact, its perversion of our natural “real-time” speed of human contact has resulted in American workers racing to get more done, more quickly, in order to stay competitive in a global marketplace. In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee predicted that, due to technology, “Americans would be working only about 20 hours a week by the year 2000, while taking seven weeks or more of vacation a year.”
Just across the ocean, the situation looks different. Europeans work, by choice and government support, 85 percent as many hours as Americans, and vacation more—a mandatory four weeks of vacation a year to our one—and are happier, statistically, than Americans in their workplaces. While our own productivity fuels a consumer culture, Europeans have translated productivity into leisure: a philosophical difference that shapes both work and home environments. Here’s the point: The way a culture views time is merely expressed social behavior, one cultural convention, sustained by reigning philosophical and spiritual traditions, and in place, likely, to serve established systems of power. In other words, we spend time in a particular way, because to do so serves the priorities of those in power.
Travel the globe, and you will see proof of this. The writer John Edgar Wideman, an old teacher and mentor of mine, explains that linear time, time that progresses from point A to point B, is a Western convention, one that arose with a Judeo-Christian tradition, where our existence begins with the act of creation by God and ends with an apocalypse—a convention still dominant, in large part, because of Christianity’s dominance in Western culture. With the Industrial Revolution during the mid-19th century and the spread of railways, linear time became an organizing principle for our increasingly complex society. With the new need for coordinated schedules to move people smoothly from point A to B, clock-time spread, the clock now a major symbol of Western society. Not surprising, the language of business and commodity coopted time: for us, “time is money,” to be “spent,” “wasted,” or “saved.”
But linear time is opposed to the concept of circular time, embraced by ancient and indigenous cultures and philosophical and spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Anthropologists note that many Latin American, Asian, African and Arabic cultures live by this more fl uid, organic sense of time, where life is often viewed as an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth, repeating and continuous, and mimicking the rhythms of the natural world.
Chronemics, the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication, argues that how cultures view time fundamentally affects all aspects of daily behavior, from how long we spend at the dinner table, to what images we find beautiful, to what our governments fund, to how we structure a school day. Cultures that perceive time circularly prize human relationships and community over a precise accounting of time. They look to the past for insight, honoring traditions and the wisdom of elders, in contrast with a linear culture’s focus on the future, on rugged individualism and aggressive problem solving, on “closing the deal,” and on a youth culture virile enough to drive progress. This might help explain why we propose Medicare cuts at the same time we spend billions of dollars to stay young; elective plastic surgeries are on the rise even in our economic downturn. Or why, during the school or workweek, we consider each passing day as just one day closer to the weekend. Referring to the challenges of U.S.-Japanese diplomacy, our former ambassador in Tokyo noted, “We’re too fast, they’re too slow.”
Travel unveils the truth that there is no single way to live. Our family traveled to Costa Rica for spring break, where we met many expats who had left jobs and lives in this country to reinvent the way they spend time: a Wall Street banker transformed into a sustainable living advocate; a lawyer now a surf instructor. But maybe more importantly, travel permits us new perspective on our own lives; only when we move outside of our lives’ habits are we able to view them more critically. I can’t help but remember the comments of the students that we chaperoned on the fi rst community-service trip to Belize, now fi ve 42 Milton Magazine years ago. We had been forced to leave technology behind: no Internet and no phone service. Unexpectedly, students discovered this tech-free living profoundly freed them. They marveled, “There is so much more time in the day!”
Voyages inward also allow us such insight. You remember the poet Li-Young Lee’s visit here in February, a visit that affected many of you. Practicing Eastern spirituality, he spoke of the creation of art as “yogic,” a form of meditation that allows us to access our more true selves. Broadly defi ned, meditation asks us to pay attention, to be mindful of immediate sensation through focused, concentrated looking. All of you in this room have experienced the creative process, the eerie thrill of doing something you love—writing a poem, performing a dance, playing a game—and losing yourself completely in the experience; suddenly hours have passed in an instant.
When we reemerge from these creative meditations, we feel clearer, truer—more aware of who we are amidst the world we live in, more fully and uniquely present, for the very reason that we have, for even a brief stretch, taken back time.
I urge you to watch the moving TEDtalk (at TED.org) by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. In the midst of a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, she watched her own brain functions shut down, one by one: motion, speech, memory, and ultimately self-awareness. The left side of the brain is the side that thinks linearly and methodically, that categorizes information, that assigns us names and jobs and histories to distinguish us each from anyone else on this planet. With the stroke leaving her left brain dysfunctional, Taylor experienced life with only the right side of her brain, the side that exists profoundly within the present moment, the right here, right now, through pictures and sensations, the side that feels connected to the collective of our human species. And though severely disabled, Taylor articulates experiencing nirvana— her sensations akin to a “genie released from a bottle,” her spirit “a giant whale gliding through the sea of euphoria.”
Though it took radical surgery to remove a golf ball–size blood clot from the left side of her brain and eight years to recover, she views the stroke as an enormous gift of illumination. Suddenly, she realized that she could choose to leave behind the left hemisphere and live, even momentarily, in this more fluid, beautiful, connective space of the present.
Seniors, it is nearly your time to leave Milton. You are on the eve of much more independence, free from your parents’ and Milton’s rules, and about to experience more free time than you have had here. But I believe that you will discover full autonomy only if you are willing to thoughtfully choose how to spend time. To choose might be a revolutionary act: one that throws out, or at the very least questions, the time structure prescribed to you from childhood.
To choose thoughtfully requires that you ask radical questions of yourselves, like, “But how do I pass a meaningful day?” and questions of institutions, like, “How might we at Milton Academy best express our educational priorities in how we structure a day?” and questions of reigning cultural norms, like, “What impact, on health, on family, on social justice, has the fact that 29 percent of Americans receive no paid time off?” To choose might be a political statement: one that urges others to examine critically the cultural behaviors that we too quickly assume bind us.
Seniors, next year make a point of meeting people, adults and peers, who consider and teach time differently; learn from them. Travel as much and as widely as you can, so you might discover new possibilities for your own life. Next year, resist, at least at first, the urge to fill the free time you have.
And, because you can, choose to take back time, for sustained stretches or for even brief moments, by inhabiting the present world around you with intense focus and attention. The longer we spend with something, the more compassion we feel for it, I believe. You know this from spending time with people; the longer you spend talking to someone, without interruption, really talking, really hoping to understand that other person, the more you uncover meaningful connection. When I run with Malia, nothing stands between us: her stories are mine to protect, her heart is mine, her air mine. When we choose to slow, to be truly mindful, we discover the real richness and joy of being here in our bodies, on this planet. I am certain of this.
Choose, even once in a while, to leave the structure of these busy days of ours and notice, say, in this very room on this very evening, the quality of the room’s light, the movement of the air through the glass of these big windows, the energy transmitted from the person next to you, the breath that passes religiously in and out of your body. There is so much to feel. Suddenly you and I do have time—suddenly, in fact, we have all the time in the world. And if you look hard enough, you’ll notice that, in this very room, you are amidst staggering beauty.
–Lisa Baker, English Department
Editor’s note: Class I students have launched a new tradition. In recent years, they have invited members of the faculty to address the class on a spring evening in Straus Library: to give a 14-minute talk. Faculty, honored to be chosen, think carefully about the words they wish to share with students who want to carry memories with them as they go. Along with Lisa Baker, four faculty gave “14-minute talks.” They included Lamar Reddicks (athletics), Joshua Emmott (history), Miles Bailey (admission), Susan Marianelli (performing arts) and Elizabeth Lillis (science).