I doubt very much, indeed, if anybody who has the time to read this book about time, would confidently be able to say that they had enough time! I have occasionally come across people who feel that they have too much time on their hands, particularly in older age. I have most often come across people who regret that they have not used their time in a better or more profitable way. Most of us have a less than straightforward relationship to time.  It is inevitably shaped by so many influences, circumstances, and even our genetic inheritance!

I have just bought an Apple Watch. I like it very much. However there are frustrating elements to it!  It has decided to tell me how to use time in order to live a good or in my case, healthy life.  Every hour I am told or reminded to stand for a minute. My heart rhythms are monitored, as is my exercise and sleep.To be honest there are so many devices on my Apple Watch, it it’s not entirely easy to tell the time! I have no doubt that I shall get used to it given a bit of time.

To continue the theme, this book is worth every bit of time that you might be able to give to it. It is beautifully and skilfully written. Its scope is an ashamedly ambitious and the chapters move, effortlessly through history, politics, social theory, cultural paradigms, ecology and geology as well as a healthy nod in the direction of spirituality.

The author, masters, time for careful research, and for those wishing to think more deeply about the nature of time this book is meticulously, researched, referenced and indexed. You might think that such an ambitious volume would require a Herculean energy on the part of the reader to navigate these complex and conflicting ideas and narratives. Not so. It is fluent and skilfully written. The reader is invited into a range of ideas and questions that draws you on and deeper. 

 We learn that Jenny Odell, artist and writer. working out of California will be know by some for her first book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. She tells us that  wrote this book to save her life.  The focus of her struggle is this :  why the world  organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving?

She charts how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells. This was followed by the nineteenth-century railroads building on  the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force. We are shown how time has been  commodified and disciplined.  Our Amazon warehouses become our Cathedrals of immediacy producing profit and efficiency.

Ans so with many of the gifts of Modernity we are living with being  out of synch both with nature and the needs of our bodies. the inner and outer worlds are depleted and impoverished. We are invited into a living which is less extractive and less dependent on domination. There is a mystical quality to her invitation to stop and watch and observe.

In moments of surrender there can be rest, and a deeper and wider view that can offer a more fruitful approach to time.  Living more  is replaced with being more alive in the moment. I think that some of us glimpsed this during Covid? Our slowing up and our separation shifted perception, the inhabiting of time and the possibility of living differently. Of all the books that I have read recently this one offers the possibility of revisiting those Covid months and thinking differently about the quality of the moment, which shapes our very relationship with time. Once this is reshaped, then there are endless possibilities for discovery, spiritual adventure, relationship, liberation and more.

There remain some significant obstacles to such ‘time equality’ not least our dependence on Capitalism and its systems of distribution of labour and wealth. There may be also something more to be said about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of time both in its temporal and eternal framework. It is no accident that there is a recovery of interest in Christian spirituality and especially practices of contemplation. There may have been some more scope in this and  for the transformative role of theology as a key to open many of the doors which are present relationship to time both shuts and locks.

This is a book to buy and read, and ponder and act upon. it’s also a book to show those of us who aspire to write what skill and creative wisdom is required of such a task.