by Ben Hewitt
This wasn’t a particularly revelatory theory, but it did make me feel a bit better about the simple fact that I was, well, tuckered. By this point, we’d been tromping through the woods for 2 hours or more, and little of the ground we’d traversed had been flat. It wasn’t as if I was suffering unduly, but my feet hurt a bit and my legs felt mushy, as if they’d been subjected to a tenderizing implement. The truth is, I’m fairly tough; I once completed a bicycle race that required that I remain awake for 36 hours straight, about 7 of which I spent actually racing. Not only that, but of the few hundred racers in attendance, I’d completed the fastest lap of the course. Like I said, tough. Yet here I was, pulling up the rear, and by no small margin. The fact that Breakfast had found the rust-pocked head of a 12-pound maul emerging from the carpet of leaves (Where the hell had that come from? There was no telling and no logical explanation, and yet, there it was) and had been lugging it around for nearly an hour did not make me feel any better.
I consoled myself with the belief that our hunt was nearly over. We’d found numerous pounds of morels, an enviable haul by anyone’s measure, and this was exciting to Breakfast and Erik. Breakfast had the maul, and this seemed to please him no end. Why, all he needed was to fashion a new handle for it, and he’d be smashing the bejeezus out of whatever he pleased. Erik had donated an unknowable but substantial quantity of blood to the area’s blackfly population; even those little buggers had gotten something out of the deal. Surely it was time to bring our adventure to a close; surely Breakfast and Erik had obligations to attend to. My own feeling at this point was basically that hunting morels was fun and all, and, to be sure, I was still looking forward to the tales I would tell, but also that mushrooming was a somewhat frivolous pursuit, and not something to which an entire day should be devoted.
Alas, my companions did not share this unspoken belief, and it was a full 2 hours more before we finally emerged from the woods, having circled almost the entirety of the hillock (Or was it a mountain? I couldn’t decide, but whatever it was, it was steep), before cutting straight up against the fall line and clambering over its grassy dome. Along the way, we’d passed through a long since abandoned apple orchard, where blossoms and diminutive white moths filled the air, and it was only after I caught one of each in my hand that I could tell them apart. We’d also stumbled into a small clearing where an uninhabited cabin was beginning the slide into a state of decrepitude that would eventually return it to the earth. Erik explained that he had actually lived in the cabin for a time, and by now I knew him well enough that hearing this did not surprise me in the least. I asked how long it took to reach the road, walking the most direct route.
“Not long,” he said. “Maybe 20 minutes.”
I pondered this response for the next while, as we slowly corkscrewed our way toward the summit. Not long, maybe 20 minutes. In and of itself, it was an unremarkable answer, but remember: He was talking about 20 minutes of walking, each way, from his home to where he parked whatever dilapidated vehicle provided his motorized transport. The path he walked twice daily wound through the woods, through the same abandoned apple orchard we’d just passed, where blossoms and moths danced in the air. There was little more than a slight impression on the forest floor and a break in the forest understory to mark the route.
I imagined Erik walking through the orchard every day, on his way to and from the outside world. I imagined what it would be like to start my day passing through an orchard with blossoms falling on me, so weightlessly gentle that if I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t know where they’d hit me. I thought about the sensation of my feet sinking ever so slightly with each step into the spongy layer of forest detritus that covered the ground. Before, I’d been tired and ready to go home, but now I felt energized. I tightened my grip on my cache of morels and scurried forward.
Even as I caught back up to my companions, I knew I was coming dangerously close to romanticizing Erik’s daily trek. And not just the trek, but also everything having to do with the freedom afforded him by his exceptional thrift. Had there been days he cursed that damnable walk, days he hurried down the mountain path as fast as his feet would carry him, days when the falling blossoms and fluttering moths brought no more pleasure than the quotidian, even mundane events of his life? Surely there must have been, and I wanted to ask him, but already he and Breakfast were pulling away from me again, carried up the hill by legs and lungs better tuned to the task than mine.
I decided that I was romanticizing things. Still, the inescapable and somewhat unsettling conclusion remained: Erik’s relationship to time was different from mine, and I say “unsettling” because I was fairly certain his relationship was less dysfunctional. I’d first noticed this more than 6 months before, during that November day I stopped by his house to find him contentedly cutting boards with a dull handsaw. During our mushroom hunt, I’d twice noted it, first when our search continued past the span of time that seemed (to me, at least) reasonable and again in response to my query about the hike from the cabin. There was something in the unhurried nature of Erik’s day-to-day existence that made it feel as if he owned his time to an extent that most of us have forsaken.
In his book Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, Robert Goodin points out that time is both inherently egalitarian (everyone has access to the exact same 24 hours per day1) and inherently scarce (no one has access to more than 24 hours per day). Goodin talks about “temporal autonomy,” which is the ability to make choices regarding how one’s time is passed. Given the egalitarian nature of time, not to mention its scarcity,2 the capacity to choose how we spend our time could be viewed as the ultimate expression of wealth, and it struck me that Erik’s unhurried, almost languid temperament suggested a particular confidence that could only evolve from an abundance of temporal autonomy. Or, put more simply, from the certainty that he could damn well do what he pleased, when he pleased.
For a moment I probed my memory, but I could not recall a single instance when I’d heard Erik worry or even wonder about the time. And I thought how interesting it was that watches have become such a symbol of status in our culture that people are willing to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars on a little clock to ride on their wrist. Perhaps it was merely the jeweled aspect, the diamond-studded bezels and gold-striped bands, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was also something in the auspicious display of the timekeeping mechanism itself, as if reminding the world that the bearer’s time is so very valuable as to demand such royal carriage. And then an irony struck me: If one’s time is so damn valuable, why in the name of Rolex would anyone allow a clock to rule it? Viewed in this light, being beholden to a clock could be seen not as you owning your time, but as your time owning you.
It occurred to me that unlike most of us, Erik does not compartmentalize his time; he does not seem to differentiate between the hours spent in pursuit of a paycheck and the hours spent in pursuit of either mushrooms, a finished cabin, or a pair of dumpster’d sneakers. He seemed to understand more clearly than anyone I’d met that there is only one thing human beings truly own, one thing that cannot be claimed by others: time. Furthermore, he seemed to respect the rather uncomfortable truth that none of us can rightly claim to know how much we own. As such, he seemed determined not to convert his unknown quantity of time—in truth, his life, for how we spend our hours and days is, of course, how we spend our lives—into a commodity, to be sold to the highest bidder.
At first, I struggled to square this with the languor he applied to so many of his tasks. For who would spend hours cutting boards with a rusty handsaw but someone who felt as if time were very much on their side? If Erik were really so cognizant of the true value attached to the ticking clock of his life, would it not behoove him to at least get a freakin’ Skil saw? But the more I observed him in action, the more convinced I became that I had it exactly backward. Indeed, it occurred to me that Erik had an absolute respect for time, to the point that he was able to exist inside any par
ticular moment with tangible contentment. He understood that the value wasn’t to be extracted by rushing to get to the next project, but rather by truly inhabiting each and every moment he was fortunate enough to experience.
I recalled a brief exchange we’d had some months before, regarding the accepted truism that time is money, which, it will not surprise you to hear, Erik does not accept. It was Benjamin Franklin who was supposed to have first introduced the axiom, in his Advice to a Young Tradesman. “Remember that time is money,” he wrote. “He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour and goes abroad or sits idle one-half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.”
Here was a depressing assertion. Had I really just thrown away nearly half a day’s wages? I wondered, as I trudged up the hill. (And where the hell were Breakfast and Erik, anyway? I seemed to have lost sight of them.) The problem in answering this question was twofold. First, how to quantify the value of the time I’d spent in search of mushrooms? By the value of mushrooms themselves? Perhaps. But even if I were to arrive at a figure based on the fair market value of whatever portion of the day’s haul I would be allotted—by now, all of our mushrooms, including my own meager holdings, had been comingled in a large paper shopping bag retrieved from Breakfast’s car—I would still be left to wonder, if only because of the atypical nature of my actual, paying work. As a writer, I am not paid by the hour or by a fixed annual salary. Sometimes, I am paid by the word, with no regard given to the time it takes to link those words together into coherence.3 Sometimes, I am paid by the project, again with no fixed or even approximate expectation of the hours spent bringing the project to completion. Complicating matters is the fact that my annual income varies from year to year, sometimes drastically.
In short, I could not conceive of a logical nor convenient way to measure the monetary value of my “labours.” Clearly, by spending much of the day mushrooming, I’d gotten myself sucked into a significant diversion, at least when contrasted against the writing work that comprises so many of my waking hours and pays to keep my family warm, dry, and fed. The slow, wretched burning in my leg muscles and the raw, scraped sensation in my lungs when I breathed deeply—which was every time I breathed—were proof enough that I had not, in fact, been idle. But still I could not shake the feeling that I had indeed thrown away, if not sixpence and five shillings, then something.
Troubling as this was, it was made even more so by yet another of Franklin’s proverbs: “It takes money to make money.” (Actually, that’s not exactly what he said. He said: “Remember that money is of the prolific, generating nature.” Which is pretty much the same thing.) If money is of the prolific, generating nature, and I’d just thrown away an unquantifiable amount of it, what had I really lost? In other words, how much money would the money I hadn’t made have made if I’d made it? You can see the quandary I was in. My mind reeled with the implications of it all. And for nothing more than a few damnable mushrooms. How quickly and profoundly I’d sunk from the self-congratulatory heights of my first moreling success.
Now, even as I mulled over all this on that late May afternoon, I knew I wasn’t engaging in particularly original thinking. There are no doubt plenty of people who understand that time and money are not so readily conflated, and furthermore grasp that the notion they can and should be is particularly convenient for the corporate entities that would very much prefer we exchange our time for the money necessary to purchase their offerings. In a sense, “time is money” could be capitalism’s rallying cry; given the broad cultural agreement that it’s true, perhaps it is.
So on this front, at least, I knew I wasn’t onto anything revelatory. But there was something else niggling at the edges of my consciousness, something that I hadn’t before considered, and it related to Franklin’s assertion that money begets money. If this is true—and indeed I think it is, one only need consider how modern financial investment instruments work—then can the same also be said of time? In other words, is time of the prolific, generating nature? I don’t mean literally, because of course one can’t actually produce more time. But clearly one can allocate time, and to the extent that time allocated in the manner of your choosing feels like time gained, whereas time spent in subservience to others feels like time lost, then in a sense, one can create time simply by allocation. Even our contemporary lexicon suggests that we view time in this manner: When we are unexpectedly freed of an unsavory commitment, we speak of the time as something found, as if it did not previously exist.4
At that moment, trailing my companions through the forest, I was struck by a sensation I know well for having lived it repeatedly: the feeling that I am failing to simply appreciate my time and that this lack of appreciation is what allows it to slip from my grasp, over and over again. Most of us do this, of course. We somehow fail to recognize that life is just a collection of moments, stacked up one atop the other until they reach their inevitable conclusion. It suddenly seemed very clear to me that if I could learn to inhabit the constituent moments of my life more thoroughly, they would feel more substantial, more satisfying. And the more I did this, the more I would do it, if only because it felt good. Like eating good chocolate, I suppose, only less likely to pad my love handles.
I knew I was treading on slippery ground, for how would I prove my foundling theory that it takes time to make time? Carry a stopwatch everywhere I go? And how to respond to the inevitable (and quite justifiable) argument that some people manage to spend their time in ways that are both financially lucrative and satisfying on a deeper level? In other words, how to know when to turn the stopwatch on and off? Because I’d seen already that Erik’s chosen path demanded its own particular allocation of time: If he wasn’t going to buy his food, he was going to have to forage for it, or grow it. If he wasn’t going to buy shoes at a shoe store, he was going to have to procure them some other way, and this way was likely to demand a certain portion of his time. Of his life.
And yet I’d observed again and again how relaxed Erik seemed, how he never appeared hurried as the minutes of his life ticked by. More than anyone else I’d met, he seemed in command of his time and he rarely, if ever, gave the impression that there was something he’d rather be doing. Perhaps this was merely an attitudinal shift, an acceptance of (or, less charitably, an acquiescence to) the facts on the ground, so to speak. But isn’t attitude shaped by the particulars of life? It struck me that Erik’s relationship to time was a by-product of simple contentment, and that his contentment was, at least in part, a by-product of his decision to live as he wished.
Finally, I couldn’t help but wonder if the accumulation of money and other dollar-denominated assets might cast a pall of anxiety over our leisure time. For who could feel good about leisure when every minute feels like a wasted opportunity? And if one is inclined to side with Mr. Franklin in the belief that time is money and that furthermore money begets money, how could one feel anything but anxiety when one’s time is not recompensed in a monetary fashion?
Except, what I observed in Erik was almost precisely the opposite: He seemed to possess a deep reservoir of trust that his immediate needs would always be met. Because of this, he was uninterested in accumulated wealth (after all, if he could always trust that his immediate needs would be met, he could therefore trust that his future immediate needs would be met). Under these circumstances, what was to be gained from denominating his time in dollars? Freed from this perspective, he was also free to inhabit any particular moment fully and without guilt that it was somehow being frittered away.
This pondering was all starting to become a bit too intellectual and interior for me and besides, it all hinged on a wagon train of assumptions, observations, and unconfirmed (worse yet, unconfirmable) theories. But I could forgive myself. For one, I was fatigued and massively hungry; even a raw morel would have tasted good, if only I could’ve caught up to
Breakfast, who was ferrying the load and seemed to be always either 20 paces ahead or to the side of me. Still, my musing had a not-inconsequential fringe benefit: Without my noticing it, we seemed to have nearly gained the summit of the little mountain; when I looked up the hillside, I could see open sky through the trees, like a beacon. Indeed, I was right, and in a few moments, we emerged from the forest and onto a grassy plateau from which we could see for many miles, in many directions. A narrow footpath wound across the hillock and we followed it to a favorable vantage point. Erik and Breakfast plopped into the grass, while I performed a few vaguely yogic stretches, hoping to ease the kinks from my back and lessen the sensation that someone had spent the past few hours peening my quadriceps with a large hammer.
It was quiet. Even Breakfast was quiet, and by now I’d spent enough time with him to understand that this was a rarity. Erik plucked a dead blackfly from his belly button and flicked it into the breeze. I leaned, rather fluidly I thought, into a complicated twisting position, and endeavored to hold it, which I did for 10 exceptionally long seconds, at which point I unwound myself, dropped to the ground, and sat for a minute or two, trying desperately not to ask the question I knew I was nonetheless about to ask.
“Hey,” I asked, keeping my voice low and casual as I stood up. “Does either of you guys know what time it is?”
