    55

    mat urity before the pools of moisture could be sucked away by the desert

    sun.

    The habits of the toad show up in one form or another over and over

    again.  They appear in the hibernation of squirrels and bears, the seasonally

    fluctuating fat deposits of woodchucks, and in a wide variety of human

    annual rhythms.146  They even show up in the moodswings of societies.

    When there's little to be gained, nature slows an organism down.  When

    opportunity arrives, she speeds it up.  One consequence is the strange

    gyration of your mental clock.

    See if this sounds at all familiar.  On a work day when I'm under

    extreme pressure, I rush through one task, hurry on to the next, then move

    quickly from that job to the one after it.  I see my allotted hours as time in

    which I can easily accomplish a lot.  But on a day when I have less work than

    usual, my mental clock readjusts.  Suddenly, instead of seeing the day as a

    period in which I can easily perform a plethora of tasks, I get the sense that

    it'll be a struggle to finish anything at all.  My mind has grown sluggish. It's

    the phenomenon behind the common sense expression, "Work expands to fit

    the time available to it."

    In a person with little to do, the mental clock slows down.  In a person

    with a great deal to accomplish--or a person excited about what he's doing--it

    speeds up.  Take, for example, the athlete who sees every eighteenth of a

    second147 of a tennis ball's motion and calculates in a wink exactly where the

    ball is going to be when he attempts to swat it.  For him, every micro-instant

    is filled with meaning.   But for the person lying on a beach catching some

    rays, a whole morning can go by without a single meaningful moment.148

    For the athlete under high stimulation, there is more time.  His world is

    richer.  Far more data is processed by his brain.

    One difference between a society on the rise and a society in decline

    may be that the rising society is on the fast clock.  It sees each impediment as

    a challenge, absorbs information quickly, and finds new ways to overcome

    its obstacles.  It operates on tennis time.

    <<  <  GO  >  >>