Editor's note: Mike Masterson is taking the day off. The original version of this column was published Oct. 6, 2012.
If you sometimes feel as if your life is bouncing like a gleaming pinball from the time your feet hit the floor until that blessed pillow each evening, it's not your imagination.
Darned near everyone shares the feeling that there just aren't enough minutes in the day anymore, much less hours. Folks far wiser than I am believe time is actually a construct of our consciousness that helps keep everything flowing in what seems like a straight line.
Well, then, just perhaps time may well be constricting as our lives become amplified--even overwhelmed--by daily demands.
Technology has contributed to the sensation of losing time. Where we once used pencil and paper, we have computers (that were supposed to be timesaving devices, remember?).
Where we once collected phone messages on pink paper from the company operator to return calls we'd missed while out, most of us carry cell phones which consume far more time each day than we realize. In effect, we are chained to devices that most of us find impossible to ignore.
Where we once drove hours to meetings, allowing for some quiet time to actually contemplate, we can easily attend those same meetings over the Internet.
The way I see it from my perch in the Ozarks, all those things and more make for wall-to-wall days. Throw in endless video games and hundreds of television channels, along with the demands of a family and children. Whew! It's a wonder we feel any time remains for us--and just for enjoying the moments of our all-too-brief lifetimes.
New Zealand historical novelist Desiree Jury wrote an article in New Parent magazine on why we feel so pressed for time today. She also faults technology for the phenomenon and makes some suggestions on how we might hit the reset buttons on our lives and at least try to regain some seeming control over how we choose to spend our time.
"Over the last 40 years there have been fundamental changes to the way we experience time," Jury writes. "Previously time was sequential. Think of an analog clock with rotating hour and minute hands. The present-- 'the time'--stands in a visible relationship to time past and future time."
She explains that since the digital watch was invented in the 1970s, our experience of time has evolved. "For many, there is only the present, only now. The first-ever digital watch was made by Pulsar in 1970 as a real-life example of the digital clock they made as a prop for '2001: A Space Odyssey.' In 1968 it was the stuff of science fiction."
Women lived in analog time, in a continuum of past and future before the social and technological changes in the 1960s and 1970s, and were expected to behave as their mothers had, she notes. "Their futures were laid out according to the expectations of their family, class and culture. If you wanted sex, independence and adult status, you got married. Family planning was frowned upon, work opportunities were limited and structured around family responsibilities."
Now lives have gone digital. There are myriad choices for lifestyle, family size, education, travel and careers. Social structures neither limit nor support them, Jury says.
"Grandparents are often absent, [living] in a different state or indeed country, or working themselves. Sole parents are not stigmatized as they used to be, but they can find it hard to cope in what has become a two-income society. Job security is long gone, replaced by 'right-sizing' and the other euphemisms for redundancy."
Technological changes, she writes, meant that work would no longer be left behind when you walked out of the office, and there would be no such thing as privacy. "And with availability came expectation that these demands and requests for action would be attended to now," she says.
So is there a way to fight back and regain some balance and perhaps even some lost time? Jury suggests trying a few ideas on for size.
Among them, she advises us to "live in boxes" to de-stress. Focus wholly on what you are doing, she says. "If you're reading your child a bedtime story, clear the housework and the boss' unreasonable demands out of your mind. But once you're at work, also focus 120 percent on doing a great job." I call that categorizing.
Find an experience to truly enjoy every day: "It doesn't matter how small--a flower, the sheen of feathers on a bird, a smile, the play of light on a wet street. Reclaim the moment."
Enjoy music, for it is a natural antidepressant: Soak 30 minutes in a world of beautiful sound because, she says, "music is good for the soul."
It sounds to me like good advice. But there comes a time in all our lives when it's darned hard for the older ones to learn new tricks, especially considering how we are the products of our lifelong conditioning.
Besides that, I'm not fully convinced that time itself (and whatever it really is) hasn't figured out a way to accelerate in a blue streak without a second's help from us.
Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master's journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at [email protected].