We need to practice time health.
The past is a story; the future, a choice.
When we talk of health, we think diet, exercise, PT, surgery, psychotherapy, meditation, drugs...
I believe we should add time health to the mix. It’s the quality of enjoying the past without entirely believing in it; and of seeing the present as a rolling series of choices that affect the future. In these crazy times, we’ve never needed it more.
Time health comes from an awareness of what tense we’re in during any conversation, especially a difficult one. That’s why I love it when a reader of one of my books says her favorite rhetorical tool is tense theory, the skill of monitoring what tense you’re in. It’s the very first tool Aristotle mentions in his Rhetoric. In fact, tenses define his types of rhetoric.
Forensic rhetoric covers the past. It’s the language of the courtroom, of crime and punishment and a spouse’s outrageous abuse of the dishwasher.
Demonstrative rhetoric happens in the present tense. It’s often called “sermonic rhetoric,” because it deals with values—right and wrong, who’s good and who’s bad.
Deliberative rhetoric, Aristotle’s favorite, has to do with decisions that affect the future. He hopefully described this rhetoric as “political,” because politicians presumably would talk about ways to make thing better.
To illustrate the power of tenses, I tell the story of how my son, George, got himself out of the crime of using up all the toothpaste in the bathroom. When I forensically accused him, the story goes, he replied deliberatively: “That’s not the point, is it, Dad? The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again?”
Years after I first told that story on NPR’s All Things Considered, my wife told me I got it wrong. George never said that to me. He said it to her, and she relayed the story to me. Plus it wasn’t about toothpaste. It was about…I don’t remember what it was about.
I blushed. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“It was your story,” she said. “I didn’t want to ruin it.”
I clearly married a saint. But she was right, it truly was my story. For years I had vividly remembered the scene: shivering wearing nothing but a towel, holding an unarmed toothbrush, shouting through the bathroom door…
It didn’t happen. But it was my past.
Neurological research shows we don’t recall the past, we construct it. Our brain creates every memory anew, like an editor polishing a manuscript without bothering to factcheck. Even real objects—a teddy bear, a newsreel, incunabula in a library special collections room, a prizewinning history book—get filtered through memory, interpretation, and identity.
When we nostalgically attempt to return to the past, we’re trying to enter a fictional tale. The people who lived in any particular era—even the younger versions of ourselves—would find our interpretation of that time to be bizarre, distorted, even scarily incomprehensible. The toothpaste vanishes. The boy is talking to his mother, not me.
In the present, I’m sitting here in my cabin at six in the morning, wearing a bathrobe and discovering that my coffee has grown cold. Through my window I see a line of snow in the dawning gloom, with the bare outline of Cardigan Mountain rising above. This is now. Things must be happening outside my cabin; but by the time I learn of them they’ll have happened in the past. If I click on the Apple News app here on my laptop, I’ll get the impression that the sound and fury going on well beyond my cabin is happening right now, everywhere and even here. But I don’t click. The news isn’t now, or here.
Then there’s the future. It will be a horror or a marvel, but it exists even less than the past does. There’s nothing real there, no teddy bear, no toothbrush. We tend to see the future as an inevitability. The world will burn, robots will rule, democracy will die. Refugees will pour from chaotic places. Americans will medicate, live sicker and die younger. Pandemics will sweep the globe, Black Death come again.
Or: robots will selflessly do our joe jobs, giving us the life promised in nineteenth-century futuristic novels. We’ll be fed, clothed, and housed automatically, freeing us to pursue our pesonal dreams. Our energy will be provided by clever use of nature. We’ll choose wise leaders through trusted AI-enabled systems. Everyone housed, everyone healthy.
Of course none of that is true. There’s only memory, and now, and choices.
Meanwhile, most of us seem to suffer from two psychological diseases: nostalgia and dread. Seen from an Aristotelian perspective, they’re arguably the same thing. Both stem from the false belief that past and future are vividly real.
The past is a mix of tragedy and joy. Forget the tragic part, and you have a lovely fairy tale. Enjoy! But you can no more return to it than you can enroll at Hogwarts.
The future undoubtedly will be a mix of the horrible and marvelous. The difference is, we can affect it. Through choices, and through our ability to resolve our disagreements about those choices, we can bend the life to come. Deliberative rhetoric serves that critical purpose.
When the recent past looks bad:
“How can we keep this from happening again?”
When the trend lines seem alarming:
“How do we do this better?”
When an opportunity appears through the chaos:
“What if we…”
Here’s to your health, in timely fashion.
I've spent a lifetime reading and writing, but this is my first encounter with "incunabula." Totally worth taking the time to look it up. Or, asking my computer to do so.