The Plague of Clocks

Last summer I read an excellent book called Margin, about creating margin in our lives so that we aren’t running ourselves into the ground. Space to rest, to wind down, to think, space for the unexpected.

We have become fixated on time. Everything has to be fast—we time things to the second. We move from one thing to another and leave no time.

The first mechanical clocks were introduced in the West during the 1200s—only a bell rang to indicate time. In the 1300s, the dial and hour hand were added. Imagine—only the hour hand!

By three centuries later, the minute and second hands were common. The wristwatch came in 1865, and now we carried time with us. It regulated our lives more and more.

We had mastered time—or had it mastered us? Apparently, early in the history of the sundial some Roman thinker was already cursing it:

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions.

Victories always come at a cost. We have reined time in, but we are always chasing our tails. We assign time to tasks, as if they are the most important things. Productivity has become a god. What about people? What about time to think about what might lie beyond time—beyond when the clock stops ticking?

And then we add to that the curse of labour saving devices! They save us time. No longer do you need to go down to the river to batter your clothes off the rocks to get them clean, or stand at the sink elbows deep in suds, hands nearly raw, and the skin cracking. All we do now is throw the laundry in a white metal box and out it comes, mysteriously clean. And so we can sit around and relax—time saved. But do we?

Of course not, we move on to the next thing, cramming more and more in. Or we get sucked into the loop of infinite scrolling on YouTube or Instagram. The man who invented infinite scrolling, which so many apps use, calculated that every day the equivalent of 200,000 human lifetimes are spent scrolling! Time that could have been used for something else.

And before we know it, time is (and we are) going, going, gone…

Is it time for you to slow down? To make time to think? To consider what really matters—not just the urgent, but the eternal?

Maybe it’s time to use some of those hours that labour-saving devices free up, and the hours lost to scrolling, to ask the questions that the clock can’t answer—what lies beyond this life—and whether the God who stands outside time might have something to say to those of us trapped inside it.

(If you want to find out more, drop us an email at explore@newlifefellowship.ie)