What Does It Mean to Live "In Deep Time?"
The first in a series of meditations on time following principles outlined in "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals."
We’ve all experienced moments in life when time seems to stand still. It’s usually when I’m experiencing either profound awe or quiet contemplation. I’m able to temporarily quiet my ever-chattering mind and just…be. Free of the constraints of the clock. No worries about what I’m making for dinner or that email I should have responded to yesterday or how I really should buy a new swimsuit because my old one doesn’t fit and I want to go to the pool because summer will be over soon…
You get the gist. That constant chatter about what it means to live in chronos — the Greek word referring to “chronological time.” Your eye is always on the clock and anticipating what’s coming in the next second, minute, hour, month, six months, etc.
But let’s go back to those rare moments when time doesn’t seem to exist at all. Maybe you’re experiencing this sensation of timelessness after a two-day hike deep in a forest where the only sounds for miles are the calls of birds, the buzzing of insects, and the crunching of leaves and branches underfoot. No cell phone signal and certainly no 5G.
Or maybe you’re experiencing it while in the midst of a meditation session that transports you far from your earthly troubles to a place where only calm silence awaits.
There can be other moments when you might enter this contemplative state. I think back to being a kid and staying up all night enraptured in a good book or encountering a sunset that takes my breath away and renders all obligations unimportant for a few moments.
But for most adults with impossibly long to-do lists and never-ending responsibilities, it’s remarkably hard to achieve this kind of contemplative timelessness or what Franciscan friar Richard Rohr referred to in the “On Being” podcast as “deep time.” Here’s what he said:
“To be a contemplative is to learn to trust deep time and learn how to rest there and not be wrapped up in chronological time…this word ‘contemplation,’ it’s a different form of consciousness. It’s a different form of time”
Some mystics refer to deep time by another Greek word for time: kairos. I first came across the concepts of deep time, chronos and kairos in Oliver Burkeman’s fantastic book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It’s by far the best book I’ve ever read in the self-help/time management space — I even recommended it on my dating app profile last year in nerdy Tara fashion — but what I really loved is how the book’s core thesis fundamentally refutes most standard time management advice.
Rather than giving you hacks to cram ever more tasks into the 24 hours of your day, Burkeman encourages you to accept the fact that your life is horribly finite. Four thousand weeks. That’s about all the average human gets in a lifetime — if they make it to 80. So, instead of fighting a losing battle to optimize your life for maximum productivity, you need to figure out your real priorities in life and take items off your to-do list.
Deep Time: An Alternative Way of Being
Because here’s the hard truth: you can’t be and do everything in life. You have to choose what really matters to you and let go of the things that don’t (notwithstanding things no one wants to do but has to, like filing taxes or taking out the trash). Maybe you can’t be a full-time novelist and travel the world as a YouTube vlogger and have a web design business and teach gymnastics and own a charming cafe and learn three different languages at the same. Or maybe you can, but I certainly cannot.
It’s only once you accept the finitude of your life that you can actually begin to enter into deep time. Because when we’re no longer trying to fill every waking moment of our day with either meaningless content on social media to fill the void or stuffing in “productive” value into every last 15-minute window in our day, perhaps we can finally simply…be. Exist. Contemplate. Breathe.
Sounds way easier said than done, right? Yup. About a year after I first picked up Burkeman’s book, I was having a near existential crisis about how much time I was losing each day to screen time and trying to do 500 big projects at once and accomplishing none. I needed a reset. I needed to give Four Thousand Weeks a re-read.
The Next Ten Weeks
After stumbling upon the concept of deep time in Burkeman’s book, I realized what I truly wanted was deep time. To do that, I needed to reclaim my life from the modern hamster wheel or chronos.
No, I’m not going off the grid and living in a cabin in the woods — though that fantasy of a writer’s cabin in Maine will forever linger in my mind —but I will follow Burkeman’s ten tools for embracing my finitude.
Each week over the next ten weeks, I plan to try out one of Burkeman’s ten tools listed in the book and report back on what it did for my life and whether it brought me closer to living “in deep time.”
If you’d like to join me on this journey, please subscribe and stick around! More to come soon. I’ve also added a few friends and family members who have expressed interest in my writing to the subscriber list.