The Tick-Tock Syndrome

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Ornish has a cellular phone, a beeper, a fax, and e-mail. He talks fast on the phone, and in the background you can hear him busily typing or opening letters. But he also meditates or does yoga everyday, and says this helps him better appreciate his machines' capabilities for connecting him with others. "There's an old Zen proverb, `Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water,'" he says. "You could just as easily say, `Before enlightenment, use your fax machine and cellular phone. After enlightenment, use your fax machine and cellular phone.'"

Dr. James M. Gordon, director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., also feels that the way we relate to time has significant medical consequences. He emphasizes our need to get in touch with the natural rhythms of life, to eat when we're hungry and sleep when we're tired instead of when we think it's the right time. "It's important to break the sense of time as taskmaster," he says.

This outlook corresponds to the way humans viewed time throughout most of history. Now physicians like Gordon, Dossey, and Ornish say it may be a more healthy way of looking at time than the mechanistic concept that developed with the invention of the pendulum clock in the 1600s. They suggest that time is not the strictly linear force that most of us--especially time-sickness victims--think it is. It is actually cyclical, like the phases of the moon and the tides of the ocean, and cannot be overcome by doggedly pushing forward. Time, they say, is a mystery to be contemplated, not a foe to be vanquished.

Dick Dahl, who writes frequently about medical and legal issues, lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Special to Utne Reader, March/April 1997.

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