Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243) Read online

  To understand the significance of this point, it helps to know that Brown, like many former drinkers, holds in high esteem the twelve-step philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which asserts that alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain. The future alcoholic first turns to drink in an effort to escape some painful aspect of experience: Brown started drinking seriously at the age of sixteen, she said, because it seemed like the only way to banish a sense of yawning emotional distance between herself and her parents, both lifelong addicts themselves. “I knew something was terribly wrong with our family from an early age,” she recalled, “but when my father first offered me a glass of wedding champagne? I remember I was thrilled. No reflection at all. It was as if I finally got to join the family.”

  At first this strategy seems to work, because drinking does temporarily numb unpleasant emotions. In the longer run, though, it backfires disastrously. Despite all your efforts to escape your experience, the truth is that you’re still where you are—stuck in your dysfunctional family or your abusive relationship, suffering from depression, or not confronting the aftermath of childhood trauma—and so the feelings soon return, requiring stronger drinks in order to numb them. Only now, the alcoholic has additional problems: as well as struggling to control her emotions through drink, she must also try to control her drinking, lest it cost her her relationship, her job, or even her life. She’ll probably start experiencing more friction at work and at home, and feel shame about her situation—all of which are triggers for further difficult emotions that are most easily numbed by more drink. This is the vicious spiral that constitutes the psychological core of an addiction. You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you—alcohol—has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause.

  Perhaps it seems melodramatic to compare “addiction to speed,” as Brown calls our modern disease of accelerated living, to a condition as serious as alcoholism. Some people definitely get offended when she does so. But her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same. As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up—so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.) Yet the only thing that feels feasible, as a way of managing all this additional anxiety, is to move faster still. You know you must stop accelerating, yet it also feels as though you can’t.

  This way of life isn’t wholly unpleasant: just as alcohol gives the alcoholic a buzz, there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed. (As the science writer James Gleick points out, it’s no coincidence that another meaning of the word “rush” is “a feeling of exhilaration.”) But as a way of achieving peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail. And whereas if you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.”

  The futility of this situation—in which the addict’s efforts to regain control send him spiraling further out of control—is the basis of the paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become famous: that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol. This necessary shift in outlook generally happens as a result of “hitting rock bottom,” which is AA-speak for when things get so bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself. At that point, it becomes impossible for the alcoholic to avoid surrendering to the unpalatable truth of his limitations—to see that he simply doesn’t have the ability to use alcohol as a strategic tool to suppress his most difficult emotions. (“We admitted,” reads the first of the Twelve Steps, that “we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”) Only then, having abandoned the destructive attempt to achieve the impossible, can he get to work on what actually is possible: facing reality—above all, the reality that, in his case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a functioning life—then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more productive and fulfilling existence.

  Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go. If you can let those fantasies crumble, Brown’s clients discovered, something unexpected happens, analogous to the alcoholic giving up his unrealistic craving for control in exchange for the gritty, down-to-earth, reality-confronting experience of recovery. Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. “You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,” Brown explains. You give up “demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes.” You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

  11.

  Staying on the Bus

  It’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience simply seems unappetizing. More specifically, though, it’s disturbingly passive. It is the virtue that has traditionally been urged upon housewives, while their husbands led more exciting lives outside the home; or on racial minorities, told to wait just a few more decades for their full civil rights. The talented but self-effacing employee who “waits patiently” for a promotion, we tend to feel, will be waiting a long time: she ought to be trumpeting her achievements instead. In all such cases, patience is a way of psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power, an attitude intended to help you to resign yourself to your lowly position, in theoretical hopes of better days to come. But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.

  I first learned this lesson from Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University. When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks. (She reluctantly concedes that bathroom breaks are allowed.) When I told a friend I planned to visit Harvard to meet Roberts, and to undertake the painting-viewing exercise
myself, he gave me a look that mixed admiration with fear for my sanity, as though I’d announced an intention to kayak the Amazon alone. And he wasn’t entirely wrong to worry about my mental health. There were long moments, as I squirmed in my seat at the Harvard Art Museum during the assignment, when I’d willingly have done countless things I usually can’t stand—shopping for clothes, assembling flat-pack furniture, stabbing myself in the thigh with thumbtacks—simply because I could have done them in a rush, instead of having to be patient.

  Such reactions come as no surprise to Roberts. She insists on the exercise lasting three hours precisely because she knows it’s a painfully long time, especially for anyone accustomed to a life of speed. She wants people to experience firsthand how strangely excruciating it is to be stuck in position, unable to force the pace, and why it’s so worthwhile to push past those feelings to what lies beyond. The idea first arose, Roberts told me, because her students faced so many external pressures to move fast—from digital technology, but also from Harvard’s ultracompetitive atmosphere—that she began to feel it was insufficient for a teacher like her merely to hand out assignments and wait for the results. She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. “They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,” she said. “Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the ones that were dominating their lives.”

  Certain art forms impose temporal restraints on their audience in a rather obvious way: when you watch, say, a live performance of The Marriage of Figaro or a screening of Lawrence of Arabia, you don’t have much choice but to let the work in question take its time. But other kinds, including painting, benefit from external restraints—because it’s all too easy to tell yourself that once you’ve taken a couple of seconds to look at a painting, you’ve thereby genuinely seen it. So to prevent her students from rushing the assignment, Roberts had to make “not rushing” the assignment itself.

  She undertook the exercise herself, too, with a painting called Boy with a Squirrel, by the American artist John Singleton Copley. (It shows a boy with a squirrel.) “It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly,” Roberts later wrote, “and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body … It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain were actually perfect copies of the boy’s ear and eye.”

  There is nothing passive or resigned about the kind of patience that arises from this effort to resist the urge to hurry. On the contrary, it’s an active, almost muscular state of alert presence—and its benefits, as we’ll see, extend far beyond art appreciation. But for the record, here is what happens when you spend three unbroken hours in a small foldout seat at the Harvard Art Museum looking at Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, a painting by Edgar Degas, with your phone, laptop, and other distractions stowed out of reach in the cloakroom: You spend the first forty minutes wondering what on earth you’d been thinking. You remember—how could you ever have forgotten?—that you’ve always hated art galleries, especially the way their shuffling crowds of visitors impart a sort of contagious lethargy to the air. You contemplate switching paintings, from a work that now strikes you as a self-evidently tedious choice (it shows three men, in a room, inspecting some bales of cotton) to a nearby alternative, which seems to show many tiny souls being tortured in hell. But then you’re forced to admit to yourself that making a fresh start, by picking a new painting, would be to succumb to the very impatience you’re here to learn to resist—an attempt to seize control over your experience in precisely the way you’re seeking to avoid. And so you wait. Grumpiness gives way to fatigue, then restless irritation. Time slows and sags. You wonder if an hour has passed, but when you check your watch, you find it’s been seventeen minutes.

  And then, around the eighty-minute mark, but without your noticing precisely when or how it happens, there’s a shift. You finally give up attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the discomfort abates. And the Degas begins to reveal its secret details: subtle expressions of watchfulness and sadness on the faces of the three men—one of whom, you notice properly for the first time, is a Black merchant in an otherwise white milieu—plus an unexplained shadow you hadn’t previously seen, as if a fourth person were lurking out of view; and a curious optical illusion that renders one of the figures either conventionally solid or transparent, like a ghost, depending on how your eyes interpret the painting’s other lines. Before long, you’re experiencing the scene in all its sensory fullness: the humidity and claustrophobia of that room in New Orleans, the creak of the floorboards, the taste of dust in the air.

  The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin. And you start to understand what the philosopher Robert Grudin means when he describes the experience of patience as “tangible, almost edible,” as if it gives things a kind of chewiness—the word is inadequate, but it’s the closest one there is—into which you can sink your teeth. Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality. Or, to use the Britishism, of really getting stuck in to life.

  Watching and Waiting

  In his book The Road Less Traveled, the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck recounts a transformative experience of surrendering to the speed of reality—one that emphasizes that patience isn’t merely a more peaceful and present-oriented way to live but a concretely useful skill. Until the age of thirty-seven, Peck explains, he considered himself a “mechanical idiot,” almost entirely inept when it came to fixing household appliances, cars, bicycles, and suchlike. Then one day he came upon a neighbor who was midway through fixing his lawn mower, and paid him a self-deprecating compliment: “Boy, I sure admire you. I’ve never been able to fix those kinds of things!”

  “That’s because you don’t take the time,” the neighbor replied—a comment that gnawed at Peck, troubling something in his soul, and that resurfaced a few weeks later when the parking brake on a car belonging to one of his therapy patients became stuck. Normally, he writes, he would have “immediately yanked at a few wires without having the foggiest idea of what I was doing, and then, when nothing constructive resulted, would have thrown up my hands and proclaimed ‘It’s beyond me!’” This time, though, Peck remembered his neighbor’s admonition:

  I lay down on the floor beneath the front seat of [the] car. Then I took the time to make myself comfortable. Once I was comfortable, I then took the time to look at the situation … At first all I saw was a confusing jumble of wires and tubes and rods, whose meaning I did not know. But gradually, in no hurry, I was able to focus my sight on the brake apparatus and trace its course. And then it became clear to me that there was a little latch preventing the brake from being released. I slowly studied this latch until it became clear to me that if I were to push it upward with the tip of my finger, it would move easily and would release the brake. And so I did this. One single motion, one ounce of pressure from a fingertip, and the problem was solved. I was a master mechanic!

  Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself—would be helpful enough if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawn mowers and cars. But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and parenting. We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in
control. So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel—correctly—as though we weren’t in control of the situation. Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than in waiting to see how they might develop. Peck recalls one patient, an accomplished financial analyst in her professional life, who took this same rushed approach to the challenge of disciplining her children: “Either she made the very first change that came to her mind within a matter of seconds—making them eat more breakfast or sending them to bed earlier—regardless of whether such a change had anything to do with the problem, or else she came to her next therapy session … despairing: ‘It’s beyond me. What shall I do?’”

  Three Principles of Patience

  In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it “dealt with,” there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless. Because what is a “problem,” really? The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.