Time, Stress, and Concentration

I note that we use “time” as a projection for internal states—as in saying, “God, this is a stressful time” or “I had the time of my life” or “There isn’t time for anything.”

Now I am stressed when I feel conflict. And not having time simply means overload. Too many conflicting demands swirl around like knives tossed up into the air by a stage performer. They threaten me. They might cut me if I don’t catch them in time, and here comes another, and a third is already falling again. Yikes!

It surprises me always how little time it takes me to get tense and irritated when I’m in a postal line with nine people ahead of me, each groaning under a mound of packages—and the postal clerks are having a cozy little chat while the people in line are steaming in silent fury. The other day I was in such a line when the idea for a funny poem occurred to me. I reached for a form that had some white space on it and started to jot lines—suddenly unaware of waiting. And then, when it was my turn, I put the sheet away feeling a slight irritation. Having to buy my stamps interrupted the fun time I was having looking for the fitting rhyme. Totally subjective.

Time doesn’t move at all. We live in eternity. What we call time is the perception of motion. We slice and dice time; we measure eternity by the motion of some mechanisms, solar or tiny, the machine on my wrist. In contented states, absorbed in some task, uninterrupted, time disappears. And, time and time again (I can’t avoid the word) after such a period ends, I take a deep breath and sigh. The sigh marks my return from eternity back into that much more hectic something I’ve sometimes, quite inaccurately, labeled “time-as-motion.” I could also talk of it as time-as-stress, time-as-indecision, dead time (as in waiting), and other terms that ultimately reduce to “I am out-of-sorts.” I never feel time when I am resolutely going about some task, when nothing interferes, when I am in the flow of things. But let the phone ring! It’s just a sound, but it feels as if someone had rudely pushed me.

I’ve discovered long ago that concentration can banish stress and tension. Depending on the stress, depending on the tension, this can take a little time. Twenty minutes are usually sufficient if the will is there. Concentration centers the mind. But where is that center? It is in eternity, in simple duration. To be out of “time-as” is also to be, oddly enough, out of the body. The reason why the ringing of the phone is as irritating as it is is because the body reflexively responds—faster than the mind. The body asserts itself and drags the mind from its point of focus. It moves the mind. It can do so because, alas, we are embodied. The phone can also produce the opposite effect. When we are anxiously brooding, waiting for news, we are centered in the body, our consciousness submerged in emotional turmoil. And then the phone finally rings. Alert. All is well. Hope springs up. We rush to answer. We sink back despondently when it is our Honda dealer’s automated call telling us that Precious needs to come in for its maintenance.

Concentration can break the spell of time time-as-motion. I know that. But the paradox is that in states of stress and tension, the obvious solution doesn’t automatically pop into my mind. The feeling must become quite irritating to rise to the level of consciousness when the solution finally occurs—and when it occurs, that moment itself is a moment of concentration. Used wisely, it solves the problem. But this demands an act of the will resisted by the organism. To gain concentration when we are harried always requires that we do something that isn’t exactly on the agenda. The list is long, the day is short—and now he wants me to sit down and spend twenty minutes writing in the diary or counting my breaths as I sit with my eyes closed? Forget that! Forget that, and it’ll be one of those days. Proceed to do the right thing, and the day will start to flow. The list will seem a little thing. The adult is back. The child we are is calmed and charmed again. Stress seeps away. Tension melts…