I am often paralyzed with the awareness that I have a finite amount of time, and a list of goals and tasks that expands every day. Sometimes it helps to realize that this isn’t a modern phenomenon; that the PDA hasn’t made it better, but neither has it made it worse.

So relevant to the modern person is Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day that it could have been published yesterday. Except for a few markers of its Victorian timeframe (mention of servants and “spirit-lamps,” for example), you might be tempted to think that it was written by a very British David Allen. I thought I’d take a stab at reviewing it for the readers who may not be familiar with this proto-personal development chapbook.

Chapter One: The Daily Miracle

“But though you have of the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.”

“In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day.”

Not so much a lifehack as an essay on the qualities of time, this chapter is. Bennett’s observations are fairly straightforward but beautifully worded, and I’d encourage anyone to read this as a stand-alone essay.

There are two takeaway points in this:

  • Time in even more valuable than money. There are always ways of making more money, but each of us has our allotment of time, and must make of it what we will.
  • Your happiness depends on how well you manage that time. “Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul,” says Bennett. I suppose as an atheist I have an out on that last one.

… actually, that raises another point. This work is remarkably lucid about mortality for a Christian author. If you believe in eternity, what does it matter what you accomplish in your mortal life? Or perhaps, as Christopher Hitchens points out in God is Not Great, Bennett is only concerned with the “immortal soul” because he lived in a time when to do otherwise was dangerous.

One thing that Bennett doesn’t touch on is how paralyzing this fear of finitude can be by itself. This is a problem I often have–I end up doing nothing because there is so much to do.

I think that this way lies the path of addiction as well. In retrospect, I can say that I was truly addicted to World of Warcraft, and the reason I was is because it numbed the pain of finitude. Anyone who has not played an MMO may not realize their power to stop time for the individual playing them, but let me emphasize that when I was playing, everything else ceased to exist. Now that I’ve stopped playing, all that fear and pain has come back, and the challenge is to look at my daily time as a miracle, as a gift, and not as a burden.

Arnold Bennett is dust. What did he make of his life? All that’s left to us is to wonder how we will make an example of our own lives.

Random Posts

Join In!