Your Time is Sacred
Part 2 of the 4-part series, Unlearning Capitalism. To receive future modules - which include guided meditations and reflection prompts - in your inbox, sign up here.
For millennia, time was a fluid and subjective construct. Work was done in alignment with the natural flows of life. Longer Summer days meant more time harvesting berries or building a new shelter. Cold Winter’s nights drew people inward, close to the fire to conserve their energy. Rather than requesting to meet on June 30th, our ancestors would have suggested meeting on the New Moon, or in the week after the caribou had passed through. The Earth’s rhythms were time, and they shifted according to the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
Time is a very different construct today. In the realm of modern work, first you give your body and then you give your time. You arrive at the desk, the shop, or the meeting in your physical form and then you stay there...for as long as it takes to complete the work or for an agreed-upon duration.
As capitalism took hold in the 16th century and forced people into mills or onto the landowner’s estate, time took on new meaning. Workers were paid not just to show up, but to stay for a period of time; and because money was exchanged, that amount of time needed to be known and measured. Now that people were dependent upon hourly or daily wages, it didn’t matter if there were extra crops to harvest at home or if the cold was unbearable - workers had to stay and labor for however long their masters required.
Time became an unforgiving tool of capitalism, and it remains that way today.
The Paradoxes Inherent in Capitalist Time
As I reflected on the relationship between time and capitalism in preparation for writing this essay, I stumbled upon many paradoxes. On one hand, capitalism turns time into a scarce resource (as it does most things). If there is limited time, then work can take on an urgency, and that urgency can be commodified (e.g., the belief that “Time is money” or charging a higher rate for a quicker output). It’s also a common sales tactic to play into the notion of time scarcity and amplify the fear people have that they could miss out on something.
On the other hand, capitalism treats time as meaningless. In Western culture, there is very little value placed on the time of the working person. We expect people to spend significant amounts of their time in jobs that they despise, are bored of, or that actively harm them. When someone outside the upper strata of the economic hierarchy raises a hand and says they’d like to work less or not at all, they are often derided and seen as lazy.
We all internalize these paradoxes and relate to time as both scarce and meaningless. Most of us put tremendous pressure on ourselves to do more, faster, before it’s too late. We also choose to spend time on activities or in relationships that diminish our lived experience. How many of us wake up with a sense of urgency - that immediate belief that there is not enough time to get dressed, have breakfast, etc., before our work calls to us? And how many of us exchange our time later in the day for work or soul-numbing activities that we know are meaningless? Modern life is a whiplash-inducing journey between the urgency of productivity and the wasteland of disconnection.
Photo by Anastasia Malai
There’s Another Way
You are more than a worker who must deliver results on a prescribed timeline. You are more than a consumer who can be tricked into lifelong FOMO. You are the descendent of people who lived according to the cycles of the seasons and the Moon - people who traced the days and weeks according to the path the Sun took through the sky. You are the descendent of people who made sense of themselves without the Gregorian calendar, without due dates, and without clocks. While that is not the world we live in now, the Sun, Moon, and seasons are all still here. Their cycles are all still here, and your body hasn’t forgotten them.
Consider time as the atmosphere around you. Imagine it as the air you move through, the water you swim in. It has no static nature or power over you, it just is. On some days, the atmosphere may feel particularly fluid and vague, as if time goes on and on without boundary. On other days, the ether you’re in may feel punishing, as if there is no space for you to take a breath. Your sense of this atmosphere - the way you feel about time - is impacted by the expectations of others around you and the expectations that you have of yourself. While we can’t always change the expectations that others place on us or our time, we can change our own relationship to it.
What if time were not scarce, but available right around us, in this moment? What if time wasn’t meaningless, but sacred? What if we lived knowing that death was just around the corner but that our souls would go on for eternity? Time is both limited and unlimited. For some parts of our lives, we need to tap into the awareness that our time on this Earth is finite. This awareness can activate us to make choices that honor our values and our higher callings. In other areas of our lives, we need to tap into the awareness that our time is infinite. This spaciousness can remind us that we don’t have to do it all today, and that healing and growth occurs in cycles.
Instead of your time being “owned” by everyone else, your time can be the pace and style with which you move through your life. You may still exchange your physical presence, time, and labor for a wage, but you still have ownership over how that exchange will feel and look.
You have a right to spaciousness and the right to honor your precious time. These two qualities may not always be present in your life, especially if you’re carrying the weight of poverty, illness, or trauma, but they are the qualities that you - and all people - deserve. If you desire spaciousness and meaningful time, imagine it wafting in around you. Rather than toxic or stagnant time in your ether, imagine it as neutral, sparkling, or as a light. What changes if you imagine having just the right amount of time? What shifts when you imagine time as a disinterested jester, happy to play with you in whatever ways you need?
Creating Space to Connect to the Sacred Self
Internalizing and embodying capitalism’s teachings about time is not only harmful to our bodies, which bear the brunt of both urgency and boredom, but it also harms our connection to the sacred Self.
Without meaningful, open time, it’s very easy to neglect the inner chambers of our hearts and spirits. So often, we hurry past the divine’s invitation to turn inward and connect to something deeper. In this late Summer period in which Virgo reigns, we are reminded that wholeness and wisdom lie just beneath our to-do lists and full calendars. The Hermit archetype, which corresponds to Virgo, can teach us the value of taking the time to separate from dominant culture and tend to our sacred natures. And it truly doesn’t take much. There are times when longer retreats or complete shifts in lifestyle are called for, but most of us would benefit from a simple meandering around the block or a quiet moment before getting out of bed.
As Martin Shaw writes in his book Scatterlings, “All it takes is a lit candle, or a snowflake at the window, or rain on the roof and the hermit wakes, with its immense “in”-ness, from behind our daily face.”
Ways to Reclaim Your Sacred Time
While challenging, it is possible to unlearn the toxic lies that capitalism teaches us about time and reclaim our cyclical nature. As with anything, the first small step is to become more aware of the texture that time has in your daily life. Are you surrounded by a sense of urgency and “not enough”-ness? Do you breathe that in and punish your body and soul for not moving more quickly? Or are you steeped in stagnation, caught in the belief that your time in this life matters to no one? Many of us are somewhere in-between or oscillating back and forth.
You are not alone in your desire to honor your time and rekindle a more natural relationship to it. The Sun, the Moon, the seasons: these are all allies in your quest to reconnect to your rhythmic origins.
Reclaiming your sacred time is a choice and a practice that we can commit to over and over again. We can choose to trust in our own unfolding and the wisdom of divine timing. We can choose not to participate in manufactured urgency among our colleagues and take more time to touch the Earth. All that’s required is a new posture, a new way of relating to time - this ethereal concept that’s been commodified by the capitalist system.
If you’d like to take a step further and play with your relationship to time, you may consider some of these practical applications:
Plan your next month according to the lunar cycle, building activity in around the Full Moon and added rest around the New Moon
Take the clocks off of your walls and hide your phone for a day
Go without electric lighting in your home for a day and see how it feels to move with the daylight instead
Find a mantra that you can anchor into when you feel an unhelpful sense of urgency in your work. It could be “I will do what I can, when I can,” or “There is enough time for this to unfold”
Let go of the practice of waking up to an alarm. See what happens when you let your body settle into its own rhythm
This week and beyond, I encourage you to reflect on your relationship to time and how it shifts when you see it as both precious and abundant.