On time, one month late


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

It seems to me that the most logical time to reflect on time is the beginning of the New Year in January. Of course, if I reflect on time at all, I usually do it in February. Here I am tempted to offer a pseudo-philosophical explanation of this shortest month's unique relationship to psychological as well as calendar time. Everyone knows that February is timeless - a short hiatus in the orderly march of events, a breathing space between the hectic pace of the holidays and the springtime promise of March.

In other words, February is a deadly boring month with nothing much happening. So why not take this opportunity to reflect on the nature of time itself? As good as that argument sounds, it may be that I have not planned sufficiently ahead, that it takes me an extra month to catch on, or, to paraphrase Zippy the Pinhead, I dwell too much on the past because the present goes by too quickly.

But the present is the only time we have. The past is memory and the future, imagination. As clock time is defined, the only reality is now. If we were limited to clock time, this would be a problem because every "now" would become "then" as quickly as it happened. Fortunately, our human nature comes with the capacity for both memory and imagination and those uniquely human abilities enlarge our experience of time to include both past and future. We move flexibly between present, past and future even when we are firmly established in the present. This fluidity is usually adaptive and is especially evident in our work as psychologists.

Recently, I participated in a special consultation regarding one of our long-term patients whose condition has steadily worsened throughout the many years she has been struggling with schizophrenia. A recent spate of medical problems and an increase in troublesome behavior had prompted a referral to a specialist in psychopharmacology who met with the clinical team before the patient and her elderly mother arrived.

In the traditional recitation of the patient's history, we told the consultant of the many hardships the patient and her family had faced in the 30 years she has been hospitalized. Only last year, the woman's brother committed suicide and the family was still re-gaining its balance after this devastating loss. Then the patient's mother entered the room, old and frail, but with a look of determination in her eyes. She moved slowly, steadying herself on her heavy cane before each step. When the introductions had been made, the consultant turned toward the mother and expressed his condolences for the many tragedies he had just heard being enumerated in the family history.

The old woman cast a kindly eye in the direction of the consultant and then turned slowly, holding each of us for an instant in her wise and benevolent gaze. "Thank you for your concern," she said. "Yes, there have been tragedies but it all happens gradually and that makes it manageable. And besides, there have been many good times as well." At that moment, the family matriarch shone with integrity in her acceptance of all the hardships life had given her. Ten minutes before she entered the room, her only thought may have been the next step in her journey, quite literally, the now of each hobbled footstep from her car to the building and up two flights of stairs to the conference room. For those of us on the other side of the conference room door, however, our present was filled with the story of the family's past, presented (made present) as if it had unrolled before them in an instant.

Life happens gradually, one now after the other, until the whole story, beginning, middle and end, is finally told. In the words of the American physicist, James Archibald Wheeler, "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." Thank goodness everything doesn't happen at once because, if it did, we could never cope with the intensity of our misfortune or the ecstasy of the graced moments that come to every life. The matriarch of our patient's family reminded us of this basic truth, so important in our lives and work that we teach it to our patients as a preferred coping strategy. Live in the moment. Survive the moment. Improve the moment. Let each moment, insignificantly small in itself, add to the imperceptibly accumulating aggregate of moments that makes each of our lives.

This is good advice to be sure, yet there is something more. Because of our uniquely human capacities for memory and imagination, within every present moment, we have the ability to revive the past and anticipate the future. We are time travelers without need of science fiction or modern technology to build time machines for our journey. Everything we need is in our heads, ready whenever we want to revisit the past for lessons learned or pleasures to savor or to conjure up and prepare for the future. It doesn't matter whether we reflect on time in January or June, as long as we remain both captain and navigator of our incredible, self-contained time machines.

On time, one month late (February 2007 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

On time, one month late
(February 2007 Issue)