Take Your Time

by Eknath Easwaran

  We don’t have to live like this. People who are in control of their lives somehow manage to be on time without arriving hurried. They get things done without even getting flustered about it, while the rest of us, harried by the pressures of life, go from place to place always just a little late and slightly unprepared. We have forgotten that it is possible to go through the day without hurry, tending to each matter as it comes up without coming under pressure.

  Living without hurry is a skill

  that everyone can learn.

  Living without hurry like this is not a gift; it is a skill. And that means it can be learned. I began to learn it through the example of Mahatma Gandhi, in whose India I grew up – and I might add that I learned it when I did have to go to school, teaching a full load of classes, managing a department, attending endless committee meetings, and keeping open hours for students long into the evening, in addition to writing and lecturing over All India Radio and a dozen other activities I enjoyed.

  At that point in my career, I was a busy young man with a packed schedule and quite a few irons in the fire. I had a job I loved – teaching English literature – and was making a name for myself in other fields. In graduate school I had even taken an extra degree, in law as well as literature, because India had just achieved independence and I was contemplating a career in the foreign service. My generation was eagerly involved in building a new nation. It was an exciting time, full of promise, and everything seemed to be falling into my hands.

  Yet for some reason it wasn’t enough. I was busy, but there was an emptiness in my heart that no success could fill. Something essential was slipping through my fingers. Meaning, perhaps. A sense of purpose, a reason for living. Certainly peace of mind. I recalled a line from Thoreau: “It’s not enough to be busy. The question is, what are you busy about?” A good question. What did I want? I had been too busy even to ask.

  In high school, I had read a story by H. G. Wells about a child who wanders down an unfamiliar street and spots a door in a plain white masonry wall. He opens it and discovers a garden where everything is welcoming and full of peace – a place where he belongs. The next day he tries to go back, but the door has disappeared.

  Three or four times after that, as he grows into manhood and climbs the ladder of success, he turns a corner and happens to see the door again, just as he remembers it. He hesitates, but always he has something urgent to attend to and lets the moment go. The years pass and he attains fame and fortune, but he is haunted by regret that he never ventured through his door again.

  When I read that story again in the middle of my life, I realized it applied to me. One detail that hadn’t meant much when I was younger jumped out at me: every time that fellow sees his door in the wall again and decides to pass it by, he first looks at his watch. He can’t take the time to stop to discover what he has always longed for.

  In fact, the Buddha says, our constant hurrying is often a kind of anesthesia. It’s not convenient to stop to ask big questions; it can even feel threatening. So long as we keep moving, we can put it off.

  “Wake up!” the Buddha says. “It is time to wake up. Why do you go on sleeping?” I was almost forty; my alarm was ringing. It was time to step back, take a long view of my life, and reevaluate my priorities. What did I really want? What was life for?

  I went about looking systematically. I knew several people I admired for their achievements; I knew others who were quite well off. I talked to them, but they couldn’t help. Those with some self-knowledge even confided, “Don’t look to me. I haven’t found it either.”

  Being a professor, I went to the library and combed the stacks in every field that seemed relevant: psychology, philosophy, religion. I studied biographies of scientists and other luminaries who seemed to have found meaning and purpose for their lives. None of it shed light on how to live my own.

  After a while of this, it occurred to me that I might be looking in the wrong places. With my university education, I had taken it for granted that people who had found fulfillment must be educated and successful. When I thought further, I realized that the people I knew who seemed happiest were often uneducated and unknown. I had grown up with them. They belonged to a way of life I had left behind and had no desire to return to, but their example told me that happiness had nothing to do with possessions, position, wealth, social status, or anything else outside.

  A simple, unhurried life can be full of wisdom and beauty.

  I thought back to my childhood. Like the door in that story, it opened onto another way of life. My home state of Kerala is a green staircase on the southwest coast of India with a culture thousands of years old. Visitors are surprised at the beauty of the state and the independent, hardworking, simple way of life that most people there still follow. By modern standards, the village where I was born was backward: we had no electricity, no cinema, no radio, no police, no court of law. But the air was clean, the water pure; rainfall was abundant and the soil fertile. Our area was surplus-producing farmland; everything we needed was grown or produced in or near our village. We grew cereals, vegetables, and fruits; we grew the coconuts that supplied us not only with food but with fiber for ropes and oil that was extracted right in the village. All the artisans we needed – carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, potters, weavers – lived at hand.

  Don’t get the impression that this was a rustic life without artistry or beauty. South Indian classical music and dance have been perfected over thousands of years, and my father was a patron; we regularly enjoyed plays and concerts by some of the best performers in India. In those days, too, men who had left the village for professional careers often returned after retirement to make a contribution to the next generation, so two or three of my uncles taught subjects like Shakespeare and Sanskrit in our little school. I received an excellent education there, and a different kind of education from the land itself.

  Of course, we didn’t have cars then. A few had bicycles – I remember when my father pedaled the first one into our family compound – but most of us were happy to walk. It was not a chore; it was a source of simple delight. The roads were lined with trees: palms and banyans where we could see monkeys playing; mango and cashew trees that we boys liked to raid as we passed. And when I had to go to school, I didn’t walk. Like little Geetha, I ran – but not out of hurry. I ran for the sheer joy of it. I ran to get there early so I could see my friends, and I ran home at noon to have my lunch hot from my mother’s hands – and somehow, after eating, I managed to run back again in time for class.

  I don’t mean I lived in paradise. People in my village were subject to the same human foibles and discontents as everyone else. But despite the lack of telephones and automobiles, despite having to tell time by the sun instead of marching to efficient schedules by the clock, they were happy – happier, it seemed to me, than anyone I knew at my university. It was a precious clue. If a village teacher could be as happy as a cosmopolitan professor, fulfillment did not come from any particular activity, place, or circumstance. Perhaps it really could only be found within. Scarcely an original thought, but I had considered it only intellectually. Now it seized my heart.

  Fulfillment doesn’t come from outside – we must look within ourselves.

  From that perspective, one person in my village stood out like a beacon: my grandmother.

  When I talk about Granny, I need to explain first that the branch of society I come from is rare in India as well as the rest of the world. It is a matriarchy, in which lineage is traced through the mother rather than the father and women have had legal rights for centuries. My grandmother was not the head of the family, but she was revered throughout the village for her wisdom. Whenever someone had a problem, he or she was likely to come to Granny.

  Within the small orbit of this isolated village, hidden from the world among coconut palms and rice fields, my grandmother passed the whole of her seventy-odd years, participating fully in a
ll aspects of village life. She arose daily with the morning star and worked till evening – sometimes, when necessary, well into the night, long after others had gone to bed. She did everything carefully, giving each task her full attention without pressure or hurry, enjoying her work without ever being driven by it.

  Granny often taught me with stories, and with the kind of short, pungent sayings that villagers live by throughout the world. “Your own gums are better than someone else’s teeth,” she would say whenever anyone in the family wanted to leave some responsibility to a servant. With that self-reliance went an independent spirit rare in rural India. Utterly unlettered, untraveled, uneducated, deeply rooted in an ancient way of life, she encouraged me to rebel against orthodoxy while she herself observed every ritual, ceremony, taboo, and sometimes ridiculous demand of a traditional society. When everyone else in my ancestral family was pressuring me to become an engineer, Granny just told me with quiet authority, “Follow your own star.”

  And she was completely fearless – another rare trait in a land where villagers live in fear of snakes, ghosts, disease, poverty, social disapproval, and countless other, nameless threats. In those days death was a familiar visitor, and in the center of our joint family home was a room called the “dark room” where the body of a person who had died was kept until it could be cremated. The candle in that room was not allowed to go out, which meant that someone had to stay with the corpse throughout the night. Most village Indians are terrified of ghosts, but for Granny, a corpse was just a tattered jacket that its wearer had discarded. On almost every occasion it was she who sat beside the body and kept the flame alive. “When Granny slept under our roof,” one of my aunts told me, “we weren’t afraid of anything.”

  That was what I wanted, I realized. That was the kind of person I wanted to be. But I didn’t want her kind of life. Literature had opened unlimited vistas for me; I needed wide horizons. I wanted the best of both worlds: I wanted to combine my grandmother’s inner strength and mastery with the modern, active life I had discovered for myself.

  Mahatma Gandhi showed how to face pressure without losing peace of mind.

  I knew of one other person who was a master of pressures and priorities. Mahatma Gandhi had been an ideal for me since I visited him as a college student in the early thirties. As the leader of a nonviolent revolution involving four hundred million people, waged against the most powerful empire the world had yet seen, Gandhi was constantly under pressure. But it never seemed to touch him. On my first visit, at the height of India’s struggle for independence, I caught him emerging from an all-day emergency meeting with the country’s top leaders. Everyone else looked concerned and tense; Gandhi looked as relaxed as if he had been playing a game.

  Today we think of Gandhi as the man who went about in sandals and homespun clothing even when invited to Buckingham Palace. But Gandhi was no simple villager. He had taken his law degree in London and was a wealthy, successful barrister when he began to dedicate his life and resources to public service. He was thoroughly acquainted with the realities of modern life.

  It was a revelation to me, therefore, to see that this most practical of idealists knew the value of every minute. I don’t think anyone has understood time better, or had a more intimate grasp of how a decision taken in a second can change the course of history. Unlike most of the rest of us in India, Gandhi considered it a mark not only of courtesy but of mastery to be on time wherever he went. Time was precious to him, other people were precious to him, so he treated their time and his own with the utmost respect. He wore only one piece of cloth around his waist and a second around his shoulders, but there was always a large pocket watch pinned to his waist with a safety pin. It was one of his noted eccentricities. And if anyone was late for an appointment, he would take this watch up and show it, no matter how distinguished his visitor. That was his gentle way of teaching us Indians to be on time.

  Staying calm at the center enabled Gandhi to accomplish great things.

  Very few people in human history have accomplished more than Gandhi. Not many even had his vitality. If you look at some of his pictures, however, he appears as relaxed as a cat. Our cat Woosh sits at the foot of a tree so quietly that you think she is sleeping. Then, without warning, you see a blur of half a dozen cats in the air. Such an explosion of movement! I always wonder where all this energy comes from. She seems inert, but in action she becomes not one cat but half a dozen.

  Gandhi was like that. When you looked at him, he seemed so quiet, so gentle, so mild, that it took a long time for the British to understand that just as a cat becomes half a dozen cats in the air, Gandhi became four hundred million human beings when he stirred the unconscious aspirations of the Indian people.

  This is just the opposite of the time-driven personality, always on the go in an obsessive drive to achieve more and more in less and less time. Gandhi represents a different type, calm at the center but able to rouse a whirlwind of selfless action when the occasion demands. From the outside, such a person may look like an old Model T, but inside there is a Ferrari. How often we find people the other way around! A Ferrari body with a Model T engine. You see a lot of speed and flash but not much real progress, and no lasting contribution to the world.

  Gandhi had not only a Ferrari engine but a Ferrari body as well. Only a strong, resilient body could have taken the rigors of that life. John Gunther, who was over six feet tall, recalled that he had to run to keep up with Gandhi when he went to interview him – and Gandhi was in his seventies at the time. His vigor was unmistakable. His power was untouched until the situation demanded it; then he would take off in no time, from zero to sixty in one minute, as calm as ever behind the wheel. It was all power steering, too. Seeing him gave me a whole new ideal of what it means to operate successfully in the modern world.

  Even little incidents in Gandhi’s life were a lesson to me. The first few times I had to stand before an audience in college, for example, my limbs would shake and the words would choke in my throat. It encouraged me greatly to learn that, as a law student, Gandhi too had been so acutely shy that he was unable even to read a brief introduction at a dinner party. He not only learned to overcome this shyness but spoke every day for most of his public life, often before some of the biggest and most hostile crowds you can imagine. But he was always relaxed and free from tension. There was no hurry, and he never succumbed to pressure.

  One amusing instance of this has been preserved in the archives of radio. When Gandhi was in London in 1931 as a guest of the British government, he had become something of a celebrity in the United States, so CBS arranged a special transatlantic broadcast – a daring feat of technology in those days, when connections often failed. Everything was set up hours beforehand, and the radio and government people were wound tight with tension. Most of Gandhi’s entourage was flustered too. A lot was at stake. It was important to them that Gandhi be effective in conveying his message to this large and influential audience.

  Gandhi himself, however, didn’t have any preparations to make. He had nothing to do with the arrangements; all he was expected to do was move the hearts of several million people in their native language when the time came. So he conducted his regular affairs in the midst of the confusion, waiting for his cue.

  Finally a harassed-looking executive came over and said urgently, “Mr. Gandhi, the radio is ready for you. They are waiting in America!”

  Gandhi sat down in front of the microphone and said, “You want me to speak into this?” Millions of people heard him, because he was already on the air. Everyone laughed as the speakers broadcast his words back into the room. The tension was broken, and Gandhi began to speak – with complete concentration, in no hurry, with total mastery of himself and the situation. You can still listen to the recording of that broadcast. It is one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard.

  An unhurried mind is calm, alert, and ready for anything.

 
My first visit to Gandhi had been prompted by one simple question: how had he done this? How had he managed to remake himself from a timid young law student with no purpose in life to a man so sure of himself that he could lead a nation without pressure, hurry, or fatigue? I found the answer that first evening. Gandhi had learned to live completely in the moment: whatever he did, he was one hundred percent present. And when I saw him absorbed in his evening meditation, I realized that complete absorption was the key.

  I was still young then; it would be years before I was ready to learn how to apply the insights I gained that night. But gradually I understood that living completely in the present is the secret of an unhurried mind. When the mind is not rushing about in a hurry, it is calm, alert, and ready for anything. And a calm mind sees deeply, which opens the door to tremendous discoveries: rich relationships, excellence in work, a quiet sense of joy. It was a revelation. There was a door to the discovery of peace and meaning in every moment! All I needed to open it was a quiet mind.

  I can’t say I worked all this out at once. It took the shock of Gandhi’s assassination and my grandmother’s passing to realize that life was racing and I had no time to lose. But once I set my heart on learning this skill, I went about it with a passion. Without dropping anything from my academic career, I turned to meditation and worked out a systematic approach aimed at combining the active, creative, meaningful life I wanted with the mastery of mind I saw in Gandhi and my granny.

  After a while, others around me became interested in what I was doing and asked to learn. Being a teacher, I made a method of it – an eight-point set of skills based on the practice of meditation.