While There Is Still Time
Childhood summers seemed enormous. The weeks between the end of school and its return felt like a genuine stretch of life, and the distance between one birthday and the next was substantial enough that becoming a year older actually seemed important.
The calendar does not change as we age, but our experience of it does. A year begins and somehow spring arrives. Summer follows, the holidays appear, and another January is close behind. Looking backward can be stranger still. Several years that felt full while we were living them can collapse into a surprisingly small space in memory.
There are several theories about why this happens. One of the most intuitive has to do with proportion. For a ten-year-old, a year represents roughly a tenth of the life already lived. At fifty, a year represents only a fiftieth. The theory has an appealing simplicity: each year becomes a smaller piece of the whole against which we experience it. Researchers have found that the perception of time does change with age, although the proportional explanation alone does not account for everything. Memory matters just as much.
A young life contains an extraordinary number of first experiences. Places are unfamiliar. Skills have not yet become automatic. Relationships and surroundings are still changing. Even ordinary events require attention because the brain has not encountered them often enough to treat them as ordinary.
Adulthood gradually changes that landscape. The road to work is familiar enough that we can arrive with little memory of the drive. A week can contain plenty of activity without containing much that distinguishes Tuesday from Thursday. Familiarity allows the brain to move through much of ordinary life without giving every experience the attention it once required.
That difference between familiar and unfamiliar experience offers another explanation for this apparent acceleration of time. Researchers studying memory and time perception have found that experiences receiving greater attention can leave more distinctive memories. Looking backward, a period marked by many such memories may seem more expansive than an equal period in which the days were harder to distinguish. It helps explain the peculiar experience of traveling somewhere unfamiliar, when a few days can later occupy more space in memory than several ordinary weeks at home.
If novelty helps distinguish one period of life from another, an obvious response would be to seek more of it. New places and experiences give memory additional landmarks, and curiosity remains valuable at any age. But there is another way of responding, one that at first seems almost to contradict it. That is where Benedict becomes interesting.
Benedict of Nursia lived during a period of considerable political and social instability. After withdrawing from Roman society in search of a different kind of life, he eventually found other men gathering around him. The short Rule he wrote for monastic communities has endured in part because Benedict paid close attention to ordinary human tendencies. He understood that a good life had to be lived within actual days by actual people.
The life he ordered was remarkably repetitive. The monks prayed at appointed hours and spent the rest of the day working, reading, eating and resting according to a rhythm that returned again and again. Benedict even adjusted that rhythm according to the seasons. Chapter 48 of the Rule gives detailed instructions about when the brothers should work and when they should read, while other chapters arrange prayer around the hours of the day.
If novelty helps create richer memories, Benedict’s monastery seems at first like a strange answer to the problem of time passing quickly. There is little attempt to make one day dramatically different from another. Benedict does something almost opposite. He gives ordinary time a structure and asks the monk to keep returning to it.
That difference matters because Benedict was not trying to make life feel longer. He was trying to teach people to inhabit it.
Near the end of the Prologue to the Rule, Benedict writes with a quiet urgency about acting “while there is still time.” He knew that human life was finite, yet there is little anxiety in the life he builds around that fact. He does not respond to the brevity of life by trying to squeeze more experience into it. He orders the day so that a person can become present to what the day contains.
Behind that instinct lies an older biblical understanding of time. Psalm 90 asks God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalms 90:12 RSV-SB)
Numbering our days can sound like counting down what remains, but the prayer asks for wisdom rather than additional time. The problem is not simply that our days are limited. It is that a limited day can pass without being fully noticed.
The rhythm Benedict creates offers a practical response. The bell that calls a monk from work to prayer interrupts the tendency for one part of life to consume everything else. Work eventually stops because something else now deserves attention. Later the rhythm changes again. The structure of the day keeps asking the monk to leave one thing and become present to what comes next.
Modern life often removes those boundaries. Work follows us home, and a device can fill nearly every space that might otherwise remain empty. One activity bleeds easily into the next. Hours remain measured by the clock, but fewer things within them tell us where one part of the day ended and another began.
This is where Benedict has something particularly useful to say about the apparent acceleration of time. Novelty can create landmarks because something unusual happened. Rhythm can create landmarks without requiring life to become unusual.
A morning walk along the same road can mark the beginning of a day even after the road has become completely familiar. Dinner with the same people can give evening a recognizable shape. A prayer repeated for years can still call attention to the fact that another day has reached its end. Repetition does not necessarily erase experience. Given attention, it can locate us within it.
There is something reassuring in that possibility because trying to make life feel longer by constantly producing memorable experiences eventually turns time itself into another thing to manage. The years become a container we are trying to fill efficiently before they run out. Novelty has value, but it cannot solve the problem of time. Eventually even the new becomes familiar.
Benedict seems largely uninterested in escaping that familiarity. His monastery places a person deliberately inside it. The work may be familiar, but today’s work still deserves attention. The person across the table may have been there yesterday, yet familiarity has not exhausted what can be known about another person. Ordinary life does not become less real because it has happened before.
Perhaps this is why the question of time changes as we grow older. The years may continue to feel as though they are moving faster, and no arrangement of the calendar can change their actual passing. Benedict offers something quieter than a way to slow them down.
His words remain: “while there is still time.”
There is an acceptance in those words that becomes easier to miss when the emphasis falls only on their urgency. Benedict does not ask his monks to defeat time or to hold on to it. The whole rhythm of the monastery assumes that an hour will arrive, ask something of them, and then give way to the next. The bell rings because the hour has come. It rings again because that hour has passed.
Perhaps that is what the passing years eventually reveal. Time was never something we could keep. Childhood summers ended too, however endless they once seemed. What changes with age may be partly our perception, but what becomes harder to ignore is the fact beneath it: every day arrives only once.
Benedict seems remarkably at peace with that. His answer was to give the hours a shape and then live inside them as they came. “While there is still time” is urgent because time passes, but it is also hopeful for exactly the same reason.
There is still time.