Post Script | November 7, 2022

The Habit of Observing Time (when you can't make another minute)

Last week was an unusually busy week. I traveled home from Toronto late Monday night, then spent Wednesday and Friday in the studio to record the audiobook for In Good Time. On Friday afternoon, I got a phone call about an email I’d been neglecting, and of course I gave the excuse you would expect.

“I’m sorry I haven’t answered you. I’ve just been so busy.”

I really do hate to use that tired word, busy, but I suppose busy is just a shorthand way for talking about the breathlessness of modern life. Despite the predictions of an early 20th century economist, our technological progress hasn’t delivered on the promise of more leisure time.

Busy is a symptom of modern life, but I don’t think it’s our most essential problem. It’s why I now doubt any time management book or system or hack that tries to peddle the promise I can make more time. It makes me think of the television show I watched as a child, “I Dream of Jeannie.” When astronaut Captain Tony Nelson crash landed on a deserted island in the South Pacific, he found a strange bottle. And you can guess what happened: he rubbed it and out popped a beautiful (blond?) Persian genie. Jeannie had the ability to make things happen, simply by blinking.

The notion of making time is the stuff of superstition—of beautiful, blond Persian genies. Can you blink your eyes and materialize another minute or hour or day? Isn’t it far truer to say that time is fixed, that you must observe its limits (and your limited capacity within it)?

We don’t make more time. Trust me, after thirty years of reading time management books, I’ve tried. I think I’ve confessed this here before, but I did, years ago, write a blog post comparing time with a tube of toothpaste. I suggested that with a little more ingenuity, a little more devotion, you could always squeeze a little more out of that tube. (Let’s just thank God for the ways we grow!)

It might seem obvious to some—that we can’t make more time—but imagine how often you hear people talk about their time as something to spend or waste or save. Our vocabulary of time is commodified, as if it were money that we could multiply by dint of hard work and creativity and resourcefulness.

A more Christian way to talk about time is to speak of observing time. That’s of course what Christians have done throughout the centuries. They’ve told a certain story of time through the Christian calendar, observing feasts and fasts to remember how God had acted in history through the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Prior to the invention of the mechanical clock, they didn’t worry themselves about their productive efforts in time and whether they made good on every available minute. They understand their observance of time was one way to tell the true story of the world.

This is to say: the difference between making time and observing time matters.

I ran into a helpful explanation of the practice of observing time as I recently listened to a book by Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery. (Abby Murrish recommended the book to me, and I’m grateful for her wonderful newsletter all about books! You can check it out here. Abby is also helping me prepare my rule of life workshop, and I am so grateful!)

Rolheiser was talking about life as it’s ordered in a Benedictine monastery or abbey. He explained that the monks and nuns move through their days according to the toll of a bell. When the bell rings, they move to dinner, to prayer, to work, to study, to sleep. They don’t pray or eat or sleep because the work of the day is complete. They pray and eat and sleep because it’s time. The bell signals this.

My friend, Laura, offered a surprising observation about the pace of a life in monastic communities. She confirmed that for all the time she’s spent as a retreatant at a local abbey, living life in response to this tolling bell makes for a “brisk” pace of life. The observance of time isn’t hurried, but it is decisive.  The nuns don’tmake time for prayer. The time is made, and they simply observe it.

//

Can I say it this bluntly? I want to help you observe time well.

As regular readers of Post Script will know, I’ve invited you to pre-order my book In Good Time and participate in a free five-week workshop I’m offering to help you write a rule of life.

I still have a lot of people asking me, “What exactly is a rule of life?” It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of unfamiliarity with the term, especially in evangelical circles. The practice of “rule-making” and “rule-observing” comes to us from monastic communities as far back as the 4th and 5th centuries. “Rules” allowed these monastic communities to articulate what communal life would look like. What would they value, and how would those values be translated into the hourly, daily, seasonal life of the community?

I’m attracted to the concept of a rule of life for many reasons. Here, I’ll simply articulate one: a rule of life is a practice of observing time. Thankfully, it’s not the kind of aspirational task time management often assigns to us. It doesn’t say make time. Rather it says observe time.

Here’s a good example of the difference. In a recent interview on Emily P. Freeman’s podcast, Ruth Haley Barton was talking about her most recent book, Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again. When Emily asked her about making the time for Sabbath, Barton offered a more helpful framework. She said we must order our lives to make it possible for us to receive the gift of Sabbath. In other words, Sabbath is a decision for Sunday—but also a practice involving decisions from Monday to Saturday. You can only practice the Sabbath by observing the limits of a six-day work week. Sabbath practice isn’t about making time (as if by dint of creativity you can cram seven days of work into six). It’s about reckoning with the boundaries of time and renouncing the less important.

And that’s what I think a rule of life does. It forces us to grapple with our season of life—its limits, its opportunities—and live faithfully in the variety of our vocational callings. A rule of life is a practice of patterning our lives in faithful response to God’s voice. It doesn’t suggest we can make time for loving our neighbor and praying, caring for our bodies and reading Scripture, serving the poor and fasting. Rather, it asks us to order our lives intentionally to make it possible to observe the time for these God-given responsibilities.

In the weeks ahead, until the December 13th, when In Good Time launches, I’ll be telling you more about a rule of life, what it means, and why I think you need it. If you want to sign-up for the workshop after you preorder In Good Time (40% off and free shipping at Baker Book HouseI), you can do so here. You’ll be committing to five Zoom sessions starting on Sunday, January 8th, at 7pm EST. The sessions won’t last longer than an hour, and every registrant will receive a weekly email with a link to the recording, in case you have to miss. There will be substantial lecture and some assigned homework, FYI!

Yours for another week,

Jen