The Most Valuable Commodity

by Claire Wolfe

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world's most valuable commodity isn't diamonds or gold or platinum. It's something that's within our grasp every day. Something any of us could have if we really sought it.

This commodity was once plentiful, but we've made it as rare as rubies. We claim to long for it and cherish it. But in fact we reject it repeatedly.

This greatly valued, yet constantly devalued, thing is uninterrupted time. We claim to long for it, while at the same time we slam our cellphones against our ears and head off for our aerobics classes or meetings of our investment club with tomorrow's urgent report in our laps.

You might realize the value of uninterrupted time in your own life – when you have time to think about it. But what we rarely appreciate or understand is that uninterrupted time is much more than a rare personal pleasure. It's more than an asset to a healthy, happy life. It's a necessity for remaining free and independent. In many ways, it's a necessity for human growth and progress.

There are really two issues wrapped up in the phrase “uninterrupted time.” The first is time itself – time to relax, time to think, time not to think, time to vegetate, time to read (really read, instead of just skimming) a book, time to listen, time to play (really play, instead of fiercely competing or scheduling boisterous recreation). Time to celebrate. Time to casually socialize. Time to perform rituals. Time to see the world more clearly. But “time” doesn't only mean leisure time. It may also, just as importantly, mean real, thoughtful work time as opposed to rushing, cramming, deadlining, and faking it. Time to delve deeply into a subject instead of Googling a quick overview. Time to construct a working model to demonstrate an abstract theory. Time to read background articles instead of headline news. Time to build a brick wall or lay a flagstone path. Time to put the last touch of craftsmanship on a product. Time to get involved in community governance. Time to do more serious research before coming to your conclusions. Time to perform chores suitable to the day or the season. Time to consider what you want to do, rather than merely reacting to what someone else demands of you.

The second aspect of uninterrupted time, is (naturally) uninterruptedness. Scientists know that if you sleep 10 hours a night, but consistently have your REM (deep dreaming) sleep interrupted, you won't be rested. Instead, no matter how much dreamless sleep you manage, you'll become less and less able to function. Without uninterrupted dreams, your mind can't synthesize the information it takes in during the day. It's the interruptions that'll kill you.

Similarly, if the telephone or your boss or your maddening schedule or the barrage of e-mail constantly rattle your days, it becomes harder and harder to synthesize the information your mind gathers every day and make sense of the experiences you're living through. This is true even if the interruptions themselves are brief or innocuous. If you're trying to concentrate, the neighbor who comes over and says, “I'm sorry to bother you, but I just had to show you the pictures from my trip to the Grand Canyon” may be doing as much harm as the boss who calls you in on the spur of the moment for a tense two-hour rant session about Client X's latest hissy-fit.

It took only one tradesman's knock on his door for Samuel Taylor Coleridge to forget his planned second half of one of the most evocative poems in the English language, “Kubla Khan.”¹ History lost something beautiful forever. And that was before telephones, instant messaging, pagers, PDAs, alarm clocks, traffic jams, ghetto blasters, car horns, elevator music, television, and the tyranny of the day-planner. How much have we lost amid all today's noise?

“Idle hands are the devil's playground”
Of course, there's an argument to be made against having time – especially against too much leisure time. That argument has been made, far back into history – and sometimes with good reason.

The Bible isn't keen on leisure. Proverbs orders us: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” Whoever said, “Idle hands are the devil's playground,” was observing a truth that can be repeated by anybody who's had to deal with a gang of bored teenagers or unemployed mill workers hanging out at the local saloon.

No, people with too much leisure seldom invent useful new philosophies or find cures for diseases. And they often do invent trouble. Sad but true.

But if for every little gang of idling thugs there's just one Isaac Newton, lying under a tree watching apples fall, then humanity benefits. Or if there's one Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) spinning tales for little girls as they drift down a river. One Henry David Thoreau living in silence at Walden Pond. One Hildegard von Bingen or St. Theresa of Avila writing of her ecstasies. One Alfred Wegener gazing at the shapes of the continents on a globe and wondering whether those land masses were once connected. One John Keats contemplating a Grecian urn. One James Watson thinking about the shape of a spiral staircase. These people advance the world for all of us. And it takes uninterrupted time, contemplative time, to do what they do.

Historical evidence indicates that ordinary men and women once had quite a bit of time of their own. Anthropologists have estimated that our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors worked only about three hours a day, on average. Those ancestors may not have lived well by our standards, but they had plenty of time to think, play, socialize, perform rituals, and look around at the nature of their world.

And consider this example of work just before the 1764 inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine – two of the major drivers of the Industrial Revolution:

[English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class writes:] “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness. A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did “sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard; wrote a letter in the evening.” Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging.”²

Since the Industrial Revolution, however, with its introduction of the tightly scheduled job and the factory (and more recently, the five-thousand-person office), in which individual humans must conform to the needs of the machine, we've taken our dread of idleness to extremes.

I've been told by more than one devout Christian (and not only by fundamentalists) that meditation is evil and dangerous because when we quiet the mind the devil can more easily find his way in. (Apparently God can only get in to a mind that's brimming with facts, figures, to-dos, and appointments.)

Our typical, twenty-first century frenzy of activity – cellphone clamped to one ear, PDA in hand, soccer-team boy and gymnastics-class girl in the car beside us as we rush home with bags of pre-processed foods Mother Nature would never recognize – speaks, nay screams, of our aversion to having idle or contemplative time.

Why do we live like this? For all the pressures upon us, this frenzy is ultimately our own choice. We could, if we really wanted to, put a halt to it. We might live more simply, but more sanely. So why, why, why do we do this to ourselves?

It starts early and insidiously
Something else arose in society at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. And it arose because of the Industrial Revolution. It's something that forms our lives and attitudes to this day. It teaches us that unthinking frenzy is right and proper.

It used to begin when we were five or six. Our parents would send us off to a school where the most important (albeit unspoken) lessons were, and still are, these:

• No subject is related to any other. History has nothing to do with Biology has nothing to do with English has nothing to do with Math. Keep these subjects in separate pockets in your mind and be prepared to switch between them on a moment's notice – never to contemplate them as a totality.
• Never think about anything for more than 50 minutes at a time – brrrrrriiiiing!
• Others will control what, and how, you learn.

Education historian (and former New York State Teacher of the Year) John Taylor Gatto has written extensively about how these and other government education conventions – such as isolating students by age and replacing real achievement with arbitrary and meaningless grades – were consciously adapted in the United States from eighteenth-century Prussian schooling methods. The Prussian system was, in turn, developed solely to produce more obedient soldiers, competent factory workers, and efficient bureaucrats to serve the modern police state.

The largest impact of such a school system isn't to teach us to read, write, or think (on the contrary, the educrats who originally developed the system considered reading dangerously subversive; too much reading could only open doors into larger worlds and make the peasants discontent). The basics of reading and writing can be taught, as Gatto notes, in about 100 hours – and much of the rest can be learned through experience, experimentation, reading, and living. The 12+ year sentence in school teaches: Don't make connections; don't get deeply engrossed in any one activity; don't pursue any one avenue of inquiry; don't lose yourself in a subject; don't be an individual. And when the authorities ring that bell – you jump.

Jump – and surrender your mind, as well as your body. In short, our schools are still preparing us to be cogs in someone else's wheel, rather than autonomous, thinking individuals.

Today it's only getting worse. We send our children to government institutions that operate on the same principles we were schooled in. But the poor things don't even get five years of leisure and learning time first. They don't get to lay on the grass and stare up at the clouds for hours. Or play quietly in a corner with bricks or sticks or blocks or mud. Instead, they're assaulted with flashing, hypnotic, rapid imagery from the TV from birth, then are all too often shoved into highly structured, high-performance pre-schools where, once again, the emphasis is on specific skills, group activities, enforced socialization with only one age group, and being measured and judged by social workers, test-makers, mental-health professionals, bureaucrats, and their own incredibly busy parents.

Even those of us who don't believe in the idea of a literal devil act as though we fear that some devil or another might get in if we quiet our minds or our lives for just a few hours, or let our children quiet theirs.

But so what?
So we go on dashing through the rat maze. So what? We're prosperous. We live longer than ever. The shelves of our stores are loaded with marvels – and gloriously affordable marvels, at that. Astonishing technical innovations, like DVDs and the Internet, inform and entertain us. For all the failures of our education system, we're hardly uninformed, with the news of the world at our fingertips. We are the crown of creation, the princes of the planet, the epitome of human achievement.

Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

Besides, there is all that trouble idle people get into. There's also just-plain-boredom, even for bright, sincere folk. Face it, excessive idleness dulls even the brightest the mind, while on the other hand, stimulation can lead to insights and discoveries. So, okay, we may occasionally feel overloaded. But if that's the price we have to pay for such otherwise great lives, we'll pay it.

But something is missing and we don't see what it is because we don't let ourselves stop and look. We can't appreciate the full value of uninterrupted time because we're so convinced that time must be crammed with activity that we never stop to ask the right questions or consider all the ramifications.

First of all, uninterrupted time is our time. It's time in which we're entirely free to make our own choices, rather than serving the boss, the IRS, or the Holy Schedule. That in itself is of great value. When we own our time, we own our lives. We have not sold those hours to the mortgage banker, the tax man, or the cause of acquiring stuff, status, and bills that we really don't need.

Second, hard work and uninterrupted thought rely on each other to make one complete whole. Watson and Crick experiment and experiment and experiment – but not until he has time for imagining does Watson see in his mind's eye that the structure of DNA must be like a spiraling stair. Edison makes thousands of failed versions of the electric light bulb – his famous “99 percent perspiration.” But if he hadn't had time for the “1 percent inspiration” first, what would any amount of experimenting have accomplished? It would have been without intelligent direction.

The famous labor and community organizer Saul Alinsky wrote that every radical leader should spend some time in jail (and he pointed out that the most effective radical leaders, from Gandhi to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, have done exactly that). Why? Because jail forces uninterrupted time on people whose entire being is otherwise directed toward action. Enforced idleness grants activist leaders time forces them to take time – to synthesize their beliefs, to create real philosophies out of random action, to write books, to formalize their visions, and to renew themselves for the battle.

Of course few of us have the brilliance to be a James Watson. We'll never write a Keatsian ode. And we're not destined to lead masses of people toward justice. So how does the world become a better place if little old we have uninterrupted time to think? Or to focus intensely on meaningful work?

Time to think, time to work on our own chosen activities, leads paradoxically to both greater contentment and greater discontent.

When we focus on what intrigues our own minds and hearts, we become more satisfied with our lives. Conversely, when we have time to think, read, and examine the world around us, we're more likely to see just how out-of-kilter certain things in the outside world are – things we might take for granted when we're rushing busily about.

We might more easily recognize a politician's lies – and have time to do something serious to combat them.

We might more easily recognize that various “solutions” being peddled by those same politicians cost vast amounts of our money while accomplishing nothing other than creating huge, immovable bureaucratic fiefdoms. (In our current frenzy, most of us simply find it more easy to pay up and shut up.)

We might look around us and say NO to some schemes we're currently too hurried to analyze. We might look around and say, “Working in that gray cubicle is really NOT such a good plan for life.” We might say, “You know, educating my own kids looks like a great idea, both for their brains and for our sense of family.” We might say, “What a discovery; it's more fun to relax than to consume.”

Next time some government beat the drums and shouted about the uniformed, regimented, lockstep glories of war, more of us might just say, “No thanks. I've got better things to do. I've got my own priorities; yours just don't look so appealing any more.”

We might find it far more interesting to pursue our own visions – once we've allowed ourselves time to have such visions. We might find occupations more interesting than those that vast corporate bodies design for us, and we might pursue them with more personal creativity but less madly driven intensity.

There are, of course, no guarantees about what we would or wouldn't do, should we seize the time that's now flowing irretrievably past us. Possibly the moralists have been right all these centuries; maybe we'd just sleep in late, get stoned, and putter away all that otherwise productive time.

But that's just the thing, isn't it? It's our time, and nobody else's. Time to do as we, not our government, our boss, our school, or our neighbors, wish us to do.

Uninterrupted time isn't only the most valuable commodity in the world. It's also the ultimate subversion of Authority.