Type A Time

It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. It is a still quiet day. With the tips of my fingers on the cool glass I can see the squirrel’s drey in the black linden tree like the viewing platform on top of the CN tower. It’s so quiet out there I wonder if the drey is abandoned. A pale gull slides across the sky.

Squirrel's drey from the kitchen 1st Jan 2023

New Year’s Eve is a strange moment. It’s like big birthdays - thirty, forty, fifty - they are not really any different from any other birthday, any other day of the year even, but there’s a big build-up. We endow them with significance. New Year’s Eve isn’t the only time to set resolutions. It isn't intrinsically the end of one year or the beginning of the next. Different cultures have different dates for it, but it has symbolic meaning to us. Which is not to dismiss it, the passing of the seasons is as much part of us as the stages of a life, and rituals are important. But there’s something about this arbitrariness of the date that’s been dinging in my head all week.

Monitor 

One of my neighbours has a watch that tells her what her heart rate is, how many steps she’s taken, how many calories she’s used, that kind of thing. She was making much of it to us at New Year’s eve drinks last night. It’s a pretty one, white with a big round face that complements her slim arm. She took it off and passed it round for us to admire.

When I had one of those it told me I wasn’t sleeping as well as I thought I was. It told me my resting heart rate was higher than it should be. It gave me lots of spuriously accurate numbers with no purpose other than to give me something to worry about and set unachievable goals around. 

There was a time in early adolescence when I stopped wearing a watch for the same reason I stopped wearing the fitbit - I was getting obsessed with the time. With being on time, and with using every minute of the day as efficiently as possible. I was on my own back constantly, watching that I didn’t waste a moment of my life that I could use to be more productive or kind.

I don’t want to give you the idea that I was actually productive or kind, although I think I was, it was more that I didn’t allow myself space to be anything else like, for instance, relaxed and spontaneous. I thought it was immoral in some difficult to explain way not to use the entire time resource of my life for getting things done, and for making myself into a better person. I blame my mother’s quoting her Irish father whenever we worked hard, saying ‘There’s a lot of good work lost in you!’ And I blame her for giving us a job to do whenever she found us enjoying ourselves. And I blame the Parable of the Talents and having a genius for an elder sister. But the real reason is that it’s probably just how I’m made.

Writing this, I can feel the familiar tension of those days pulling around my heart, like the taughtening of a piece of chamois leather when you pull closed a hole. It takes an unhealthy hyper-alertness to achieve anything like a pass mark with that kind of self-monitoring. But I did quite well at it all the same and when I stopped wearing my watch I found I didn’t need it any more because of the accurate one I had deliberately incised into the tissue of my own mind. 

Impatients

In the psychology module at medical school we studied type A coronary-prone personality, which was trendy at the time. Type A was discovered when an upholsterer worked on the chairs in the waiting room for a busy cardiac clinic and commented that he'd never seen chairs worn in the same places - on the arms and the very edge of the seats. The patients were so impatient that they literally couldn't wait.

People classified as type A suppress signs of fatigue in themselves; work near to maximum capacity whether the task is finite or not; find it impossible to do nothing even on holiday and tend to be dissatisfied with their achievements. Having a type A behaviour pattern makes you twice as likely to get coronary heart disease. 

For the psychology experiment, each student was hooked up to a heart monitor and told to estimate when a minute had passed (without counting) following an unpleasantly loud sound. Type A are so aware of time passing that they press stop in well under a minute. The Type B students were so laid back that they could let the time leak away for three minutes or more, and their heart rates didn’t rise at all. One or two forgot they were supposed to press the buzzer at all. 

When the phlegmatic professor gave me my results he said my heart rate had doubled and I had guessed the minute exactly. I was proud to have got it right. I was Type AA, on the extreme end of the spectrum. I was confused. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?

Happy dogs

Yesterday I went on a walk in the park while my daughter did her 5K training run. My exercise was a paced walk, using a heart rate monitor to make sure it was at the optimum intensity. To make sure it was challenging enough to efficiently improve my fitness, but not so hard that I overdid it, 'suppressing signs of fatigue' and had no energy later. I think of myself as more laid back than I used to be, but perhaps not much has really changed.

I envied how the dogs, let off their leads, sprang about randomly with the joy of chasing smells. They didn’t care if they overdid it. They didn’t have any problem knowing what they wanted to do or messing up their hair. Watching them I remembered the time I became too old to skip in the street. No one had to tell me not to, I just knew. I didn’t understand why a girl could do it but a woman can’t. 

Ten minutes later I found myself skipping onto the empty BMX track. The track is made of soft tarmac with little hillocks on the straights. Fun to run up the hillocks and walk-slide down. Fun to stumble up the high sides of the sharp turns, arms out, not actually making airoplane engine sounds so as not to disturb the man doing Tai Chi four meters away. That was me, letting go.

New Year's Eve is only another day

At the party last night I took a sip of my mulled wine and held out my hand to examine the watch. ’I was given a fitbit for Christmas one year. I wore it twenty-four hours a day for a year, but then I decided to stop. It wasn’t good for me to be monitoring myself all the time.’ 

A gives me a blank look, and says, ‘I thought you liked monitoring yourself.’

I don't like it I thought, confused. But wasn't that what I was supposed to be doing? 

This morning I woke knowing that if the first of January doesn’t have any intrinsic significance, then every day is a new year. Any day or any moment is the start of something. Every moment is the end of something. What would letting go of using time as an achievement tool be like? Would it even be possible for me to see the time carvings on my mind as nothing but an interesting pattern?

To the auburn spaniel there is no time, there’s only the joyous smell of rabbits. To that gull sliding on the sky what is there but the ever-changing pressure of the air? 

(This is an oversimplification of the type A behaviour type. If you want more detail, this is a summary Type A Behaviour. As it points out, this type is based on a group of entirely men and personally I also fit into type C).