Time not only reminds us of our humanity, but also betrays it on occasion. Time serves as a threat and a promise. Redeem it well; it’s a promise. Squander it, and it’s a curse. Time itself is amoral, but we allow the way in which we choose to redeem time to infuse our life with meaning.

As it so happens, I live in the bastion of industrialized, western culture: America. In America, time is money. Time seems excessively linear. You’re going forward or you’re going backwards. Use it or lose it. To do it faster is to do it better. Streamlining your life allows you to have more, be more, see more. Our concept of redeeming time is inherently wrapped up in cultural ideals.

One of the most telling mirrors of any culture is its language. So let’s examine what it means in 2000-something America to be “slow.” Morally, we associate it with idleness or laziness. Socially, we associate it with provincialism, backwardness. Intellectually? Stupidity. Idiocy. In contrast, think about the ideas you associate with the word “speed,” “fast,” or “fast-paced.” Efficiency. Effort. Power. Progress. Successful. Smart. Sharp. A step ahead. In fact, the most negative association I can drum up at the moment is “grueling,” a particularly ambivalent idea in light of the puritan work ethic.

Yet it remains popular to recognize that before “Just Do It,” “There [Was] No Finish Line.” Many scholars (i.e., Whorf) argue that time hasn’t always entailed the linear. In fact, literature often frames time as a more cyclical concept, one which is popularly associated with more traditional cultures. There is a comforting lens of nostalgia with which a beleaguered mind will often gaze on past cultures. But I think pointing backwards to another time or culture is, at best, a misinformed, albeit well-intentioned, attempt to battle the cultural presuppositions that pressure so many people to hasten already hurried lives.

With good reason, many scholars strongly disagree with those scholars that give into this notion. Barnes, critical of these dichotomizations of traditional and modern worldviews, feels that this conclusion is little more than “an amusing but ultimately sterile ballet of symbols.” So I pause here to acknowledge: just as industrialized Western time is not fully linear, traditional conceptions of time are not thoroughly cyclical. I’m not advocating a return to “simpler” or “happier” conceptions of time. (For the record, neither am I suggesting that the “cyclical” and “linear” are moral dichotomies.)

I’d be foolish to claim that old Nike slogan as a relic of another era. (Just the same, I do think “There Is No Finish Line” promotes a saner philosophy than that of “Just Do It.”) But, like many others, I sheepishly catch myself finding unhealthy comfort in an escape to the purely “cyclical,” a Never-land-of-sorts where life isn’t something you do at all. I envy the ability to live unfettered to the slavish notion that time is better spent because you spent it doing more or doing everything faster, because redeeming one’s time requires so many counter-intuitive choices.

All this talk of time well-spent reminds me of the biblical account of Lazarus’s two sisters, Martha and Mary. In the account, Jesus Christ comes to visit the sisters’ house. Martha, desiring to put him and his companions at ease, spends the visit hurrying around in order to meet the physical needs of her guests. Instead of joining Martha in the preparations, Mary spends the visit at Jesus feet, engaging in spiritual kinship through conversation. When Martha expresses her frustration with Mary to Jesus, he rebukes her for neglecting the more “needful” thing with which Mary chose to redeem her time. “Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,” he reminds Martha.

Without being guilty of nostalgia, I think one can say that “a full life” is not simply a quantitative idea but also a qualitative one. As it is, life is like a vapor. It’s gone almost as soon as it begins. Ironically, what makes it valuable is not how little or how much we accomplish, but whether we accomplish the needful thing, in itself an extensive topic. I’m suspicious that our concept of “well-spent” time is irreparably molded to our cultural expectations. Ultimately, whether one is content or dissatisfied with the tempo of their life, our susceptibility to cultural norms should cause everyone pause (no pun intended). How do we measure time well-spent? What informs that perception? Do my choices connect to that needful thing?

I know this isn’t the post you’ve come to expect, but my cultural research pollutes everything these days. My sense of irony shudders at the sentimentality and seriousness in this post. I know it’s not quite up to snuff. But maybe its personal nature will make up for the rest of the literary drivel. As my wise friend S. pointed out: if you live by your successes, you die by your failures.

In the literary context, I chaff against that tripwire when I attempt to apply the technique of scansion to poetry. No exaggeration; the penciled meter markings floating above the verses in my college anthology embody mis-scansion. On the best of days, I could identify the iambic, anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic. But if you would have asked me to tell a cretic from a amphibrach, the game was up.

As a remedy, I bought Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (1965). If Paul Fussell, author of the The Great War and Modern Memory and Class: A Guide to the American Status System, couldn’t enlighten me to the close reading of poetic form, who could? (Admittedly, Fussell has written more than these works but those I mentioned are the two upon which I tend to construct his identity as a scholar/thinker.)

The book doesn’t disappoint. Although hewn from a narrowly new critical mode, Fussell’s work dissected poetic meter and form with such thought and precision that I ended the book with my own appreciation of poetry transformed. I am disproportionately pleased to find my taste in verse more intimately aligning with an appreciation for the intricate texture and artistic conventions under-girding the lines I read.

My fondest “ah-ha” moment arose from the chapter entitled “Free Verse,” where Fussell announces:

…usually the free-verse poet’s ambition is less to exhibit meter than to keep it from showing. He has numerous methods for reinforcing sense, methods resembling those by which a writer in traditional meter “syncopates” by executing significant variations on established patterns.

I am not a poet nor do I spend hours expressing myself in poetry. But I identified with this fight against meter as (don’t laugh) a runner. I’ve never been one to run with music, and rhythm has everything to do with my aversion to the habit. When I run I do have a consistent tempo I maintain, unless I have particular plan to do otherwise. But if I listen to music while running, I end up fighting the tempo of the music and spending the entire run trying to overcome the natural temptation to physically respond to the music by matching the tempo of whatever song plays in my mp3 player. The result? I am unable to sustain any tempo and my run disintegrates into a fast-then-slow, long-then-short stride game. Alright: this may seem like an insignificant connection, but it gave me a tangible way to appreciate the measured effort of those poets who write masterful free verse.

In spite of my cheesy applications of Fussell’s work, if you want to brush up on your poetry, Fussell’s a great source for a thorough introduction to traditional boundaries and artistic expectations that can help you learn to appreciate the poetry you read to a greater degree.

And this wasn’t going to be a review, but somehow it ended like one…

A street jogging seminar would do well to open with a lecture on defensive jogging, an idea that parallels the philosophy of “defensive driving” in driver’s education training. A defensive mindset underpins a street runner’s route, training, methods, and form. I thought myself sufficiently trained to tackle the dangers of vehicular traffic with my textbook hand signals and personal safety precautions until the morning threats of a flash flood drew all of Frontenac Street outdoors to bag up loose leaves, twigs, and flyaway mulch. (Rubbernecking is a wilderness temptation for the inquisitive.)

On that morning I jogged out in front of a royal blue hybrid as it rolled to a stop at the half-hidden stop sign. What frightened me more than anything was that I saw what I suspect was a Spectra Blue Prius too late (it descended the short, steep hill in less than three seconds) and heard no hum, squeal, or whirring engine. Not a sound.

If you grow addicted to street running, you must learn to listen. With cars often parked along the sides of both roads, you can no longer trust the three-second glance both ways. What you are trying to detect, motion, cannot be recognized in the amount of time your retinal networks have to process visual images. No longer are you asking is there a car? Now you ask is there a moving car? In order to answer this question, you really must listen for sounds, the hum of an approaching engine or the whistle of the wind on a spoiler.

Apparently I’m not the only one to naively run out in front of the spookily silent hybrid. More pedestrians and cyclists are finding themselves distrustful of their ears on city streets. Hybrid vehicles moving at less than twenty miles per hour can be undetectable on clean-swept, paved roadways. Joggers, beware.