Читать книгу On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast - Catherine Blyth, Catherine Blyth - Страница 12

When I am in a flap – texting, talking, eating, fixing meetings to discuss meetings I did not attend – I often think of the fly in Aesop’s fable, the one who sat on the wheel of a chariot crying, ‘What a lot of dust I raise!’

‘How are you?’ friends ask.

‘Busy.’ I may smile, but basically it is a non-answer, just one boastful notch up from ‘Fine’. Like a stock cube, the word condenses life’s banquet into a deadly four-letter word. This makes it ideal for shutting down unwelcome lines of conversation. Curiously, although everybody understands that busy is dull, it is our proudest alibi for whatever we do all day. Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, suspected that a lot of busy is a time-filling tactic – one that enlarges the vacuum it aims to fill:

The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time that is ‘empty’. Paradoxically enough, this bulging time is often frighteningly empty when viewed in retrospect.

In the short term, busy makes us feel important, the buzz of even bogus tasks generating a seductive sensation of efficacy, like static fuzzing a TV. But while engaged in our frenzied show of bustle, what are we omitting to do? It is a question posed by two very different men, both of whom transformed civilization in their way.

The first was Socrates, a lapsed stonemason with a face like a punched potato, who is said to have cautioned, ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life.’ By all accounts he lived out this philosophy, downing his tools to become a free-range teacher. He roamed Athens with a retinue of wealthy students, collaring citizens with sly questions that made them feel silly, expertly getting up the noses of the elite while leaving his wife to bring up their three sons, whom he ignored. Until 399 BC, when he was put on trial as a public menace. The guilty verdict brought a choice: exile or execution. Typically, he argued that leaving Athens was not worth the bother and downed a cup of hemlock. A noble death, wept the flower of Athenian youth, perhaps forgetting Socrates’ family, left with neither wealth nor a noble name to protect them.

Socrates became the wellspring of Western thought without writing a word (he left that to students such as Plato). It is tempting to take his warning against busyness for the counsel of the original dude. But he was too subtle a thinker to underwrite a slacker manifesto. Why else would his warning have been echoed twenty-four centuries later by the most industrious man in history?

‘Being busy does not always mean real work,’ said Thomas Edison. ‘There must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose. Seeming to do is not doing.’ Edison was an arch doer. The indefatigable wizard of Menlo Park’s inventions, including the phonograph and film camera, secured 1,093 patents in the US alone and sired several major industries. ‘I have got so much to do and life is so short,’ he told a friend. ‘I am going to hustle.’ Edison had a simple scam for packing it all in: pickpocket time. On average he worked eighteen maniacal hours a day (up to sixty on the trot for truly intractable puzzles), snatching a few hours’ sleep a night and taking restorative daytime catnaps in one of the cots that dotted his workstations. By the age of forty-seven he estimated his true age was eighty-two, since ‘working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time’.

You may shudder to measure your life’s output in Edison years, and no healthcare provider would recommend it. Fittingly, it is thanks to him that everybody’s day stretches beyond its natural limit, courtesy of the light bulb.

I doubt whether Socrates’ and Edison’s definitions of a time-rich life would have had much in common. However, both recognized a timeless danger: if you mistake frothing from task to task for meaningful activity in its own right, you will fizz about like a pill in a glass of water, expending vast amounts of energy on increasingly invisible returns. It is also a licence for rudeness and thoughtlessness, for avoiding events we do not want to attend, relieving us from the responsibility of interrogating our choices. Not my fault: I’m just too busy! Margaret Visser, a historian of everyday life, wrote:

‘No time’ is used as an excuse and also as a spur: it both goads and constrains us, as a concept such as ‘honour’ did for the ancient Greeks. Abstract, quantitative, and amoral, unarguable, exerting pressure on each person as an individual, the feeling that we have no time escapes explanation and censure by claiming to be a condition created entirely out of our good fortune. We have ‘no time’ apparently because modern life offers so many pleasures, so many choices, that we cannot resist trying enough of them to ‘use up’ all the time we have been allotted.

In reality busy is a hollow word, a descriptive term for effort; it reveals nothing about whether that effort is productive, purposeful or a waste of disorganized time. Next time I feel busy, I will ask myself, what for?