Stefan Klein

The only thing we are sure of when it comes to time is that it is in short supply. This is odd because, measured in hours and years, we are richer than people have ever been. No previous generation has had so much leisure time and such a long life span. Still, more than a third of all Americans report that they do not have enough time. And the number keeps growing with each new survey.

These numbers are dismaying in light of new neurological findings: the feeling of being under constant pressure triggers stress. Chronic stress can have a lasting impact on the brain; it injurious to our health and lowers our life expectancy. An incessant time bind is insidious particularly because time pressure feeds on itself, and the result is a vicious circle: Once we fear that we won’t be able to get all our tasks done on time, we lose our grasp of the situation and things go from bad to worse. A lack of time makes us lose sight of the future, and we find ourselves running behind events instead of shaping them.
Calendars and schedules do little to address the problem, because they register only clock time, whereas harried feelings originate in our consciousness, which is oriented to inner time. It is therefore essential to understand the laws governing time.

The differences between inner and outer time are especially stark when it comes to our personal circadian rhythms. The time displayed on a wristwatch reveals very little about how our bodies go through the day. Some people have to struggle each and every morning to get out of bed and get going; others sparkle with energy at the same hour of the day. The time of day, the sunlight, and even the amount of coffee we drink are relatively the same for everyone, so the contrast must lie within us.

Why is it that some of us can skip from one meeting to the next in high spirits and stay cool as a cucumber, but others moan and groan when faced with a relatively light agenda? Indeed, the “retirement syndrome” is often accompanied by complaints, about a lack of time when a person is no longer employed, which quite obviously can only be explained by an internal, subjective sense of time.

The time we read on clocks represents only a tiny segment of what we experience as time in our lives. The second hand deals only with the present, it does not register the past and future, whereas people also live in their recollections, which are, in a sense, time frozen in their memory. What mechanisms transform the time we have experienced into memory? How is that people can travel back into the past in their minds? And can people really see their lives flash before their eyes at a moment of mortal danger?

This book explores the hidden dimensions of time, the phenomena that cannot be reduced to minutes and hours. The focal point is the question as to how the experience of time comes about – and how we can learn to deal with it more mindfully.