Keeping God’s Time in Man’s World
Image by Michael Mellinger, Sun dial in Meknes, Morocco
As I sit here writing, I am facing South. Since this newsletter is about orienting oneself in time and place, I thought it appropriate to ask myself: “Sitting at my desk as I often do to write, wouldn’t it be nice to know what direction I am constantly facing?” Far be it for me to write on honoring time in its many forms from a place on high. I simply find myself, time and time again, called to this message that I ought to be more aware of my place in time from the ways nature and the celestial bodies mark time, to the rituals that depend on time, to the wisdoms that are embedded in time's passage.
The Long View On Productivity
The word productivity derives from the Latin pro + ducere which means ‘to bring forth or draw out.’ One can see how productivity culture has leaned heavily into this etymology to excavate ways to draw out the maximum effort from the time that we have. But let’s talk about the long view on productivity for a moment.
The highest act we can engage in, or the loftiest stage we can achieve is not connected to a timetable. Allah says in Surah Al-Dhariyat, “I did not create jinn and humans except to worship Me. I seek no provision from them, nor do I need them to feed Me. Indeed, Allah alone is the Supreme Provider—Lord of all Power, Ever Mighty.” (51:56-58) The highest good we can produce is a life that bends toward worship, knowledge, and love of Allah. The most important product we produce in this life is not a thing or a project, but rather ourselves. When we, like alchemists, draw out the gold from the base metals within us, we are at our most productive. That means that even when you find yourself without a goal, you do in fact have a goal; even when you feel aimless, you have an aim; even when you can’t figure out what direction to go in, you do have a direction to go in. The answer to every uncertainty is: Allah. It is liberating that with all the competing notions on how to spend one’s time and how best to organize it, ultimately there is only one thing God wants from us. And, with all this cyber-talk about finding your passion in life, if you have no other “passion,” don’t feel inferior, trod along while knowing that you can engage that highest good no matter how you earn your keep from 9 to 5.
Illustration in “The Book of the Silvery Water and Starry Earth” or “Tabula Chimica” (“Chemical Table”) by Senior Zadith, Baghdad. An ancient sage holds a tablet called “The Letter of the Sun to the Crescent Moon” with symbols representing the quintessence of alchemy.
Digital Time Changes Our Priorities
Our constant stopping for the obligatory prayers is an invitation to honor time. If we could just pray at our leisure, this acute awareness of the passage of time would not exist. When the adhan erupts, it announces that prayer is more important than whatever we are currently engaged in. But how do we stop from feeling like the adhan or the prayer is just one more thing in a long line of interruptions we face in our day? And doesn’t it sometimes feel like everything is an interruption, even the things being interrupted? Studies show that we check our phones on average over 200 times a day and that we fail to stay glued to one task without interruption for more than a few minutes. So, what is our work anyway?
When nothing we do is shielded from constant interruption, that’s a clear indication that we don’t have a sense of what matters most to us. We are blurry on our priorities and the more we treat activities the same, the closer we are to losing our grip on our priorities altogether. How do we tell the significance of these tasks when one can’t hold our attention more than the next? My phone beeps to tell me I have a new email message, it beeps again to tell me dhuhr is in, and it beeps a third time to tell me I got a text from either my sister or some company offering a discount code. Digital time, in tandem with our new technologies, collapses all occurrences into one: a beep, ding, or buzz. This digital collapse makes everything important and nothing important at the same time. If we were to live without digital time, we’d need other markers to navigate our day: rooster crows, sunrise, sunset, dusk, the twinkle of the first star when the sky darkens, and more. We would have more ways to mark time and distinguish between the various important and unimportant events of our day. Many of us recognize the need to make these distinctions; so we might have a different ringtone for our loved ones, utilize a separate device for the adhan, or an alarm clock set apart from our phone. In moments of clarity, we feel frustrated that those things which matter to us mingle too intimately with trivialities so we sever them in small ways. In our era, are there ways to recreate the meaningful variety that natural observance offers?
He makes the dawn break; He makes the night for rest; and He made the sun and the moon to a precise measure. That is the design of the Almighty, the All-Knowing. (9:96)
Merging with our clocks
Astrolabe dating back to 1123 H, Fez, Marocco
We have internal and natural indicators of our place in time: the slow and burdened blinks of our eyes when light floods our bedroom in the morning, the afternoon slump, stillness, and drowsiness when the sky darkens, circadian rhythm, women’s cycles, rem sleep, the nine months of pregnancy, the time it takes to breathe in and out deeply. Even the blind can keep their circadian rhythm aligned with the sunlight if the photoreceptors in the back of their eyes are intact. We have cosmological indicators of our place in time like dawn, sunrise, sunset, twilight, dusk, new moon, waxing, full, waning moons. Something almost mystical happens when humans create new technologies, from things of widespread use like clocks and things of personal use like to-do lists. We slowly morph and merge with our inventions, imbuing them with life and intelligence and giving them the privilege of being the standard to which we then conform. We observe nature, both within ourselves and on the horizon, and invent things that either mirror nature or seek to manage it on a scale that is comfortable for us. To make the most of these useful inventions, we subject ourselves to them. After all, what use is a clock if I don’t observe its time, and what use is a to-do list if I don’t follow it? But whenever we invent something new, we risk creating degrees of separation between the original object of our observation and ourselves. Seeing sunrise is fundamentally different from noting the time of astronomical sunrise on our phones. These days, we treat sunrise and sunset like attractions that we, as tourists, make plans to see. Ancient nomadic Arabs used to travel with small idols as a way to have a clear locus to direct their worship. Medieval Arab historians note that it wasn’t always this way. Idolatry was something they fell into step by step and before long the “pocket god” they carried around became their actual god. The story is more complex than what I briefly laid out, but it still acts as a cautionary tale. Whenever one turns away from the source, even when they believe it is for the sake of the source, they must be vigilant against making the means the end.