Time On Your Hands

Time On Your Hands

If only!

Did you know there are optimum times for us to be working and thinking cognitively? Most people have a very short window, usually a couple or three hours. If you are lucky you have two of these windows. It is at this time that you apparently do your best work. Those who have ever participated in time and motion studies may have even been told what their windows are.
Employers look at these times and consider them to be optimum times when the person should be giving their best for the service or the company. If you have an optimum cognitive time of between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. then you should probably not have a lunch break until the Archers has finished on Radio 4, so employers would say.
Me, I would say this is the very best time to be creative; to think, to read, to write, to wander around and take a good look at the spectacular world in which you live.

In a recent “Observer” questionnaire a range of politicians had to answer a range of questions so that we, the great British public, could learn a little more about them as though this might influence the way that we voted. One of the questions was “What super power would you choose?” There were the fairly usual choices of invisibility, time travel and flying but one consistent response echoed over and over again, and that was the ability to be in two places at the same time.
It would definitely be the one that I would choose. Life would be far less complicated if this was possible. Like Faustus, I would happily trade a few years of my life for this fulfilment but sadly, it is never going to happen.

Time is so precious and we spend so much time misusing it, wasting it, not prioritising the things and the people that are most important to us right now. Time does not stand still no matter how much we would like to pretend it does and the grains of sand run too rapidly for those of us with so many aspects of our lives still waiting to be lived.

Some people have weird misconceptions about the best way to spend time, thinking that the world is going to wait for them as they preoccupy themselves with the mundane, the peripheral, the unimportant. I remember the wonderful Dennis Potter stating that he would happily bump off a certain male newspaper tycoon on receipt of the news that he had terminal cancer. He felt that this would have been a good use of his time to some extent but then he said, “I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy”.
He knew his priorities, for sure and was an exceptional writer to boot.

He went on, during that incredible interview with Melvyn Bragg to talk about the importance of living in the now, with the wisdom of one who has a termination hovering over him, though I suspect he would probably have said the same thing irrespective of this cancer.
“And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can't................ no matter how predictable it is, there's the element of the unpredictable, of the you don't know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.”

He continued.
“Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.”

And here is the most beautiful statement from this speech.
“But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know.”

He continued once more.
“There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”

Dennis Potter is so right. We should all listen to him now and realise the essence and the sense of those words.
I remember watching the interview when it was broadcast some fifteen years ago. Time flies, see!
I remember being deeply moved by the whole experience and I remember sitting there, not weeping howls of anguish but realising that my face was awash with spent tears that had flowed empathetically throughout the interview.

I suspect that Potter would not have asked for the super power of time travel. He seemed to suggest that whilst it is also a magical thought to be able to disappear back in time, there is little purpose other than living in the moment and that living in the present doesn’t mean that there is predictability. Far from it! There is a life about it. A living. A being. I like that.
I’m not sure that he would have chosen to have the power of being in two places at once either. I think he had a healthy respect for time and the nature of time as it stands, in reality.

Potter also highlighted another really vital issue about time; about the lack of it in his case. He mentioned that the blossom looked whiter and frothier than it once did. He mentioned that the trivial suddenly gained importance and the differentiation between what was trivial and what was significant was indefinable.
These are important messages about time. These are important messages about redefining what is important.

For the terminally ill, when time is disappearing, you look more closely. You see the absolute significance in things. You haven’t got time to be choosy. An instinctual urgency kicks in.
How sad that we only tend to see the blossom when we fear we will see it no longer.

I think the key message from all of this is that Dennis Potter was saying you cannot explain this to someone who has not experienced this and maybe we should all try and experience “newness” before we are terminally ill, before we are on our last legs. What he is saying is that we should be experiencing this now! I wonder if he realised how zen-like he was sounding.

We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who know that there is an end in sight. We, as a race, are possibly the only ones who have sufficient cognitive and emotional intelligence to be able to rationalise this and do something about it, and yet we spend our lives concentrating on the unnecessary, concentrating on the things that are not vital instead of concentrating on the things that are going to give us ultimate happiness, serenity and spiritual wellbeing.

We need to look up instead of at ground level. We need to take the time to walk and talk and enjoy.
We need to make time for the most important people and the most important aspects of life. Yes, we have to have certain things in place in order to survive but being the best teacher or the most accurate accountant or the most tidy housewife or the most dedicated follower of whatever is ultimately not the most important thing to be.
We should be listening to music, sharing our thoughts on what we hear. We should be looking at the ever changing world, of the growing greenness as the summer shimmers in. We should be reading and writing just as Dennis Potter did. We cannot all be as brilliant as him but we can try. We should be meditating and eradicating every thought from our mind and just enjoy searching, realising and enjoying the essentials of life. We should be considerate to others without swallowing ourselves into the bargain. We should smell the roses and embrace the sunlight.

But we don’t, do we?

For those who think that they have not got enough time on their hands, then think again. Is it really a lack of time or a lack of prioritisation?

I’m thinking now of all of those ex-MPs and indeed ex-PMs who have more time on their hands than they had thought they would have had or more time than they hoped they would have.
If I was them, I’d be relishing this moment for the serenity and hopefulness that it offered.
If I was advising these people, I would implore them to stop, take stock of the time on their hands and get out into the streets to see the remnants of the spring flowers. I would ask them to sit for a while and recognise the utter value of stillness and silence. Without this, they are never going to reformulate their ideas. Without this, they will never hear the words of truth spoken to them.

Here’s the truth. Today, I read the transcript for the interview between Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter for the first time since I watched the programme all those years ago.
The message and the thoughts resonated immediately yet I had heard them exactly and poignantly spoken over a decade and a half ago. I’d sat and listened intently to that interview, to the point of a cascade of tears and yet I did nothing with the words that this man spoke. I got involved with his ideas but I didn’t engage them. I didn’t act upon them. I hurried along with my life without really looking at the blossom in full, without really living in the present tense either.

We may have a rough idea of life expectation but we don’t really know how much time we have left; apocryphal buses are but a mere street away. But we do have time on our hands if we can only remember to use it wisely.
As Dennis Potter says, I can write this and the reader may take it on board but to really understand what this nowness is about, you have to live it.

And I am only just beginning.