A few weeks
ago I saw Rachel Biel’s post on the TAFA-Forum for members in response to her friend A. Abdul Wardak’s poem on time.
Rachel wrote something about trying to balance out everything by keeping a
notebook, getting rid of clutter, and focussing.
Through
these posts I was reminded of my former life as an academic - to be more
precise, a linguist - and the research I was conducting at that time, on usage
of the English word ‘time’. It was a large post-doctoral study in which I
looked at more than 150,000 instances of the word and the context it appeared
in, all of these instances taken from ‘real life data’. (They call that a
‘corpus-based study’ and it was all in vogue at that time.) I left my position
at the university for personal reasons before I had completed that study, and
decided I was going to something else in my life, so I can’t give you a concise
presentation of the all-over final results it might have yielded had I just
held out long enough. But I did find out a few things about the word
‘time’.
Please
note: I did not find out the real solution to many people’s problem(s) with
time as such, of which St. Augustine
supposedly said that he knew exactly what it was as long as he wasn’t asked to
talk about it. It was not a study on time management.
Anyway –
the English noun ‘time’ is very frequently used in combination with a verb, and
much more frequently so than in a phrase such as “the time is right to...” or
“on time” or even “at that time” (which I have used above). The most
frequent combinations in which ‘time’ appears (linguists call that a collocation)
are the verbs spend, waste, take and have. In that
order of frequency. So we talk or write a lot about how we “spend a lot of time doing this and
that”, or that we “can’t spend a
whole lot of time on...”. We
are very much afraid to “waste much time”,
or we “don’t have enough time to...”.
And we are concerned with the fact that things “take (up) too much time”. We try to save time wherever possible. (I had not started looking at that
collocation when I left, but I had written the four chapters on the most
frequent collocations.) And we try to manage
time. I wasn’t planning to look at that last combination in particular in my
study, in fact, I don’t remember it appearing noticeably frequently in my data –
perhaps due to the fact that the corpus I used had been assembled in the eighties
and early-to-mid-nineties and the real obsession with time management came only
afterwards?
These
combinations tell us a lot of things about how we perceive time – it is a
commodity, it has value, it is an asset. At least the western world’s thinking
is strongly characterized by this conceptual metaphor (see Metaphors
we live by by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) of time as an important
commodity that can be dealt with in earnest, very similar to money. Many of the
contexts I found in my corpus were negative, either explicitly negating the
verb (“I don’t have enough time to…”), or in meaning (“I’m spending a whole lot of time these days…”). We do not have a
positive relationship with time.
Which is why we end up writing lists of all the things we
have to do “by that point in time”, try to learn how to arrive at perfect self-
or time-management. And still there never seems to be just enough of it to get
all the things done that we would like to do or have to do. And never is there
enough time to not do anything at all. (Which is the only reason why it has taken me several weeks to put all this into writing and share it here.)
Having done
all this research, of course, does not guarantee that I am not prone to having
periods when I fall into that trap myself. But I do tell myself to remember these results, and it
does give me incentive to at least try and change my thinking about it all. We
do have a lot of time – our entire life-span. Of course, we don’t know how much that
is in terms of years, i.e. amount.
But what
really counts is the quality we give it. One big help in this thing might be
humor – linguists put it like this: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like
a banana.”
And perhaps
this approach by Amber Kane is a good first step into the right
direction.