The Present Moment

Nooresahar Ahmad, Hartlepool

‘No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already.‘

At the heart of the lines, an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, there is an interesting question. How exactly does one deal with “the present moment”, or, in other words, the passage of time? In the excerpt, the hustle and bustle of daily life saves the protagonist Orlando from having to deeply reflect on the conundrum. But when I first read the lines, we were in the midst of the third lockdown since the pandemic started. The flurry of daily life was reduced to days spent at home, and as a result the present moment seemed to be constricted to the four walls of the house, the pre-COVID past seemed worlds away, and the future seemed uncertain.

Even without the pandemic, time has always been a difficult concept to grapple with. Isaac Newton, for example, viewed time as an objective aspect of the natural world, unchanged by motion or matter. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, proposed a new relativistic model in which clocks ran slower or faster depending on their speed or location. Sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that time is simply a social construct. Edmund Leach, the anthropologist, wrote, “We talk of measuring time, as if it were a concrete thing to be measured, but in fact we create time by creating intervals in social life. Until we have done so there is no time to be measured.”[1]

In Western cultures today, time is overwhelmingly conflated with work, and seen as something that has to be utilised effectively. This is reflected in the English language; time is spoken of metaphorically as a valuable commodity and a limited resource. Think of some common phrases we use regarding time: “Time is money”, “Don’t waste time”, “Is that worth your while?”, “Do we have much time left?”, “I’ve invested a lot of time in this”. Because our society is driven by work (and we measure our time by how many tasks we are able to complete and thus how much money we have made) our understanding and experience of time is as something that can be spent, saved, or squandered.

Perhaps this is why, even in the face of a deadly virus which forced many people away from work and into their homes, a lot of people were still concerned with how to use the time productively. Whether it was getting fit, baking, finishing some home-improvement project— it seemed many felt the need to spend the days picking up some new skill or completing some kind of work. In an article for the BBC, Sally Maitlis noted that, “The importance accorded to ‘being productive’ goes back several centuries…But [particularly] over the last 30 years, [advocates] relentlessly beseeched us to improve our personal productivity, strive to become more efficient and effective and to get more done, faster. Many people have so internalised these values that change is no simple matter.”[2]

The understanding of time as linear, and the association of time and work, is not something that is adopted in all cultures. One article notes that, “In countries inhabited by linear-active people, time is clock- and calendar- related, segmented in an abstract manner for our convenience, measurement, and disposal. In multi-active cultures like the Arab and Latin spheres, time is event- or personality-related, a subjective commodity which can be manipulated, molded, stretched, or dispensed with, irrespective of what the clock says.”[3]

My own understanding of time was no doubt shaped in part by Islamic teachings. In Islam, time is moved forward not by deadlines or by clocks, but by the offering of prayer at five different junctions of the day. I recall, as a child, memorising the different times of prayer: Fajr beginning at dawn, Zuhr when the sun begins to decline, Asr when the sun reaches a point nearly halfway between the beginning of decline and sunset, Maghrib after the setting of the sun, and Isha at night. To me, this creates an understanding of time which is not only in tune with the natural world, but also consistently prioritises a higher purpose and connection with Allah. The day is something that you move with, rather than something you attempt to dominate through deadlines.

It’s easy to wonder if, after a year without the usual bustle and routine of life, whether our attitudes to the passage of time will be greatly affected— or if we will still feel it necessary to be driven through the days by ideas of productivity. To me, the most comforting attitude to time is that which is contained in the Quran: “He merges the night into the day, and He merges the day into the night. And He has pressed into service the sun and the moon; each one runs its course to an appointed term. Such is Allah, your Lord; His is the kingdom, and those whom you call upon beside Allah own not even a whit.” (35:14) Time, then, is ultimately within the control of the Creator— it is up to us how we choose to move with it.

[1] Time in Early Modern Islam, Stephen P Blake

[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201230-how-the-pandemic-could-redefine-our-productivity-obsession

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5?r=US&IR=T