Conference time | tempus comeditur

As February sees the 2015 annual FMLM conference come and go, we hope that the FMLM membership, and indeed all those with an interest in leadership in literature, take time to look through what the Bookclub has to offer. As this month’s editors’ blog details (below), time is not always on our side. So we encourage you to take time to look around. With a general election on the horizon and the NHS on the edge of a privatization precipice, there is much to consider.

In February’s review forum with Helen Cliffe, we discuss The Health of the Nation by David Owen, and look at how the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 may be placing the ‘NHS in Peril’. Topical to the concurrent 2015 Cricket World Cup, Kaanthan Jawahar has recently taken a swing at examining the breakdown of Kevin Pietersen’s relationship with the England Cricket team (from KP’s perspective) and considers how the episode may relate to Team NHS. And as we continue to wait for the final word from the Chilcot report, you can read an intriguing view on the behaviour of the Iraq War protagonists in The Hubris Syndrome, also by Lord Owen, which was reviewed in December 2015. We also hope to feature an interview with Lord Owen in March on both of these recent works, so watch this space…

tempus comeditur

Time is a commodity that can be rapidly diminishing, not only as the world ages into a continually evolving modernity, but also as we age ourselves. I can loosely recall a piece of historical psychology research encountered during my third undergraduate year in which participants were asked to walk across Parker’s Piece, a public green space in central Cambridge. The catch in this study was that each was asked to keep their eyes closed and then walk for what they considered to be a fixed time (let’s say a minute). The summary of the results was that if you controlled for speed, the older the individual, the shorter the distance they achieved, meaning the faster their internal clock.

We are all familiar with this phenomenon. The endless summer holidays of younger years, the ‘…are we nearly their yet?’ from the back seat of the car, and the interminable 40 minutes for each school lesson that these days seems to be a blink of an eye. But the modern world also steals time from us. ‘Time-saving’ devices occupy us at every turn, often actively competing for our attention. Ever increasing commitments, whether work-related or personal, can combine to consume our waking hours, leaving little space for things that we might consider aimless. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that time-management is such an important skill to learn, since it allows us to keep on top of own world, each as we see fit.

These thoughts came as I sat on the plane to Iceland, rifling through the pages of the first book that I had had the opportunity to read in many months–incidentally The Hubris Syndrome. Devoid of distraction in a metal tube with wings hurtling across the North Atlantic at 30,000 ft, I was able to devour the book in a single session, (although to my disappointment, wifi is now becoming widely available on most flights). This was something I had never done before. Part of me felt compelled to finish the book because I might not have time once I arrived, but it was also in no small part due to the fact that the book held my interest, another phenomenon we can recognise as causing temporal contraction. Many of our leisure activities can be for this very purpose, but I would argue that reading for distraction has been shifted down the preference order in how we occupy ourselves in our spare time.

By chance, the synchronous cinema release of The Theory of Everything, starring Eddy Redmayne as Stephen Hawking, reminded me of how temporal dilation can be effected by gravitational mass (general relativity) and relative velocity (special relativity). We can make an interesting argument as to whether sitting in the aeroplane was relativistically giving me more time to read (through both effects), since on landing the world would have passed by at an increased rate as I remained ever so slightly relatively young. No real time gain there, but I might have ‘bought’ a mere fraction of time within my own lifespan to enjoy a little more reading. I would imagine that there are simpler ways we might achieve this; I won’t say how, only encourage you to find them.

Then my own walk to work the day after returning led to one final coincidence. Officially unveiled by Stephen Hawking in 2008, the Corpus Clock (see image) is an oddity that I pass on foot daily. Its maker and alumnus of Corpus Christi College, John C. Taylor, also appropriately called his time piece the ‘chronophage’, the time eater, accurate only every 5 minutes as the wheel jumps back and forth irregularly beneath the grasshopper escapement’s feet. Its rather macabre notion of eating time was reminiscent for me of another film, Cronos by Guillermo del Toro, in which a creepy device containing a supernatural insect is used to prolong life with the expectedly unnatural consequences. The closeness in imagery of the chronophage and del Toro’s cinematic creations is striking.

So this string of thoughts and coincidences led me to reconsider the phrase tempus fugit. Are we really letting time slip away from us? I would prefer tempus comeditur, time is eaten, placing a vampiric onus on ourselves to make sure that our time is eaten apportionably by the tasks and fancies in our lives. Let’s not forget to make time to read…