Not long ago, I was sitting at my desk at home and suddenly had the horrifying realization that I no longer waste time. It was one of those rare moments when the mind is able to slip out of itself, to gaze down on its convoluted gray mass from above, and to see what it is actually doing. And what I discovered in that flicker of heightened awareness was this: from the instant I open my eyes in the morning until I turn out the lights at night, I am at work on some project. For any available quantity of time during the day, I find a project; indeed I feel compelled to find a project. If I have hours, I can work on an article or book. If I have a few minutes, I can answer an email. With only seconds, I can check telephone and text messages. Unconsciously, without thinking about it, I have subdivided my waking day into smaller and smaller units of “efficient” time use, until there is no fat left on the bone, no breathing spaces remaining. I rarely goof off. I rarely follow a path that I think might lead to a dead end. I rarely imagine and dream beyond the four walls of a prescribed project. I hardly ever give my mind permission to take a recess, go outdoors and play. What have I become? A robot? A cog in a wheel? A unit of efficiency myself?
I can remember a time when I did not live in this way. I can remember those days of my childhood in Tennessee when I would slowly walk home from school by myself and take long detours through the woods. With the silence broken only by the calls of birds, I would follow turtles as they slowly lumbered down a dirt path. Where were they going, and why? I would build play forts out of fallen trees. I would sit on the banks of my own pond, Cornfield Pond, and waste hours watching tadpoles in the shallows or the sway of water grasses in the wind. My mind meandered. I thought about what I wanted for dinner that night, whether God was a man or a woman, whether tadpoles knew they were destined to become frogs, what it would feel like to be dead, what I wanted to be when I became a man, the fresh bruise on my knee. When the light began fading, I wandered home.
I ask myself: What happened to those slow, simple hours at the pond? How has the world changed?
Know Thyself 