Learning How Not to Keep Time with The Time Keeper

A Blog and Book Review

By: Elizabeth Redhead Kriston

Listening to audiobooks has opened up my world. Because I use the free service from my local library and download audio files via the Overdrive app, my selections are limited. This has caused me to explore genres and authors and topics I would otherwise pass by in the bookstore. When it’s free, it’s easy and painless to try out something new.

Mitch Albom, best-known for his nonfiction work Tuesdays with Morrie, has written several novels over the span of his career. His little novel, The Time Keeper, popped up as “available now” on my search feed in my Overdrive app so, I clicked “checkout” and downloaded the book.

I also place a back-up in my queue because I was certain, based on the description, this fable would not be to my liking. I was wrong.

While it is far from my favorite book ever, I enjoyed Albom’s storytelling as he imagined how time was invented and why. Through the narrator, the reader is introduced to a precocious boy who live thousands of years ago who allowed his wonder and curiosity to allow him to first notice the predictability of the movements of the sun and moon and then invent ways to measure those cycles between day and night. Without realizing or even having a name for it, he invents time.

Time it turns out is not as helpful as we know believe it to be. In fact, Albom takes the reader on a journey over millennia to teach us that by counting the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, we are denying ourselves the pure pleasure of living. Deep, right?

We learn this lesson through the yearning of one modern-day elderly man to live forever and the desire of one modern day teen to die young.  Albom uses great imagination and deft writing skills to keep the reader engaged in this sometimes wildly magical and mostly improbable story. Rather than question the possibility of who and what Albom supposed Father Time to be, I wanted to hear the story. Happily, I stuck with it through the very last word.

If it had been a longer novel, or if the fantastical elements had gotten much grander, I am certain I would have clicked “return” on my app, but it was just the right length. By the end, I did what Albom intended. I reexamined my own use of time.

I tend to measure my success by how efficiently I use my time. Time management is a skill that I have proudly mastered. Time management is an ability I encourage my children to grasp. Throughout my day there is rarely a minute that I am not doing something. Typing blogs, cleaning, cooking, organizing, working, reaching out to family and friends, walking or exercising, planning, etc, are all the things I am constantly doing.

As a result, when I run out of things to do one of two things happens. I get antsy and bored. I crash and burn. It is so hard for me to sit and just be. It is so hard for me to just watch, listen, think, feel and be still at the same time. Albom, in the conclusion of The Time Keeper, takes us back to before time existed and reminded us how one would just exist between sunrise and sunset enjoying just being. No one checked watches or looked at schedules. No one was driven to do for productivity’s sake. Things were done for necessity, not success.

Albom writes, “When you are measuring life, you are not living it.” So I am going to take this wisdom and work on using my time differently. I will take more time to just think, to just observe, to just feel, to just sit, to just listen, to just be.

Rush- Time Stand Still

I'm not looking back

But I want to look around me now

See more of the people

And the places that surround me now

Time stands still

Summer's going fast

Nights growing colder

Children growing up

Old friends growing older

Freeze this moment

A little bit longer

Make each sensation

A little bit stronger

Experience slips away 

Experience slips away 

The innocence slips away

Ways to Learn to Just Be: 

(No electronics is required)

1. Meditation
2. Do yoga without goals or competition
3. Walk or hike in the quiet of early morning or evening
4. Sit in nature. Take in all the sites, smells, and sounds. 
5. Fish on a quiet lake or stream
6. Sit in a sunny spot with tea. Taste the tea and feel the sun on your skin.
7. Pet your dog or cat or hamster or snake or turtle or bunny
8. Garden. Feel and smell the dirt. Notice the plants and colors and growth.
9. Watch a sunset or a sunrise
10. Stargaze
11. Kayak especially in early morning or at dusk
12. Float in a pool or lake
13. Massage
14. Draw, paint, sculpt for the process, not the product
15. Cook for the pleasure of creating food
16. Knit, crochet, sew, embroidery, hook and yarn rug making
17. Play a musical instrument
18. Lie in a hammock under a tree
19. Camp rustically not with bells and whistles
20. Soak in a tub
21. Sit on a bench and people watch. Try not to judge or mock, just watch
22. Journal

Okay, now that I have my list I better get to it because I am running out of time. Sigh… This is going to be harder than I thought.

Tell me the ways you like to just be

Learn about Overdrive here