THINK INSIDE THE BOX

THIS WEEK HAS IMMERSED ME in the baffling, sometimes freakish, elasticity of time.

I’m more time concious than ever before, probably because I’m 42 and not 22. And most of the time what I’m concious of is how disorienting it can be. A movie on TV that I thought came out three or four years ago turns out to be 15 years old. My neice starts college, which is weird because she was in grade school a few weeks ago, I’m sure. When talk of high school, or my experience performing at Disneyland, or my early work days comes up, I have to say things like “20 years ago,” which inevitably puts a perplexed wrinkle between my brows. I have to resist the urge to count the years on my fingers just to make sure I didn’t add a decade by accident.

But that’s a natural consequence of time, and one that, while unrelenting, is also utterly beyond control. All you can do is resign yourself to it. (Actually, that’s not true. You can obsess about it too. Trust me.) What’s more frustrating in a way is the way we distort time through our own devices. At five o’clock Monday morning I was in New York. At ten o’clock Monday evening I was also in New York. In between, however, I was in Atlanta. Wednesday morning and Thursday evening bookended a trip to San Francisco. That’s pretty normal business travel, but it plays hell with your sense of time. The four-hour client dinner Wednesday night had me eating dessert at what felt like 1:30 in the morning. I tried to be witty, engaged, fascinated and smart, but all I really wanted to do was make a pillow out of my pudding …

You can predict the rest of the rant: How “time shifting” has become the holy grail of technology, allowing us to theoritically pick and choose how experiences fit into our personal schedules, but removing the sense of a common experience among our coworkers, friends, neighbors, and family in the process … How email has created not only the expectation of nonstop access, but also of immediate responsiveness … How we outfit our homes with offices, and our offices with home-like accents, blurring the distinction between work and repose. (Although, that’s not unique to the techno-age. My grandfather ran a gas station attached to the front of his house. I don’t recall many meals that weren’t punctuated by a ringing bell and grandpa running out to fill a tank.)

There are a ton of cool and useful things that come from all of this, but there’s one thing I think time has forgotten in its rush to the future: Contemplation.

It’s ironic. In my profession, what clients pay us for more than anything else is our intellectual assets. They expect us to be smart and creative and informed and strategic and insightful. As they should. But they also expect an answer NOW. A recommendation NOW. A point of view NOW. The notion of thoughtful contemplation, of mulling, considering and formulating is seen as, shall we say, antiquated. It’s not the fault of any one thing or any one person. We’re a commerce-driven society. Shareholders want dividends, and the race is on. CEOs these days have perhaps 18 months to prove themselves or … NEXT!

This is, in my opinion, the primary challenge of so-called “knowledge workers” today. We don’t really have much time to simply think. The people and organizations that protect and encourage that time will win in the marketplace. I’m convinced of it.

The reason the implications of this intensely compressed experience of time was on my mind today in particular was because when I hit the sidewalk to run some errands I was expecting a typical mid-November Saturday, brisk and brusque. What greeted me instead was Indian summer. The sun was bright and bouncing off the Hudson. The breeze was idylic. It was as if fall had dipped its toe into chilly waters, changed its mind and run back inside someplace warm. It was the kind of day I could imagine my great uncle Leo, a passionate amateur botanist, gently pulling a branch of crimson leaves toward the ground for a better, and long, look before strolling deeper in the woods with his shirt sleeves rolled up and no firm sense of when he’d be back home.

So time once again freaked me out, but this time by slowing down. When I talk about the creative process in my presentations, I talk about the importance of “incubating.” It’s necessary to take a break from the breakneck pace of concious attempts to figure things out, and just let your mind wander. Today was a wandering day.

I doubt if my clients would ever let me bill them for a walk in the park, but that’s just the sort of thing that has yielded some of the best work of history’s creative geniuses. When Sir Isaac Newton was once asked how he developed the theory of gravity he simply said: “I thought about it all the time.”

© 2006 John Armato
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