I was the drum section leader in my high school marching band.
One of the habits that I tried to cultivate in not only the minds, but the bodies, of the players in my section was that whenever we were playing together, they needed to be “marking time” by making small movements of their feet along with the beat of the music.
The reason for doing this is so the players got used not only to the tempo of the music they were playing, but also to being able to march while playing it. The goal was that eventually they would no longer have to think about moving their feet, but rather do so almost instinctively.
Another way of thinking about what we transform from strange into instinct is the formation of a habit.
This particular habit of “marking time” effectively created a new norm for the folks in the drumline. As they turned their attention away from what they were doing with their hands with the drum sticks, and invested their effort into ensuring that their feet were moving with the quarter notes, slowly they thought less and less about their feet as they turned their attention back to the music they were playing.
What initially required genuine effort eventually faded into the background as the habit emerged. Marking time eventually was less something that they hd to remember to do and became “normal” such that they would even forget about it (despite their feet betraying the habit that had now been formed).
Norms are funny things.
Norms determine what we take to be “normal” without reflection. In this way, they are almost always unconscious. Indeed, it is only as unconscious that they can effectively serve as a backdrop for action. Indeed, rarely do we reflect on the norms by which we live—and in many ways this is necessary for being able to live without being overwhelmed. If all of our assumptions were always at the front of our minds, then we would not be very good at moving forward as a result of them.
Imagine the following analogy. The only way that advanced mathematics can occur is because all sorts of math is taken for granted as the background assumptions on which new work can then proceed. If a student doing math always had to start with a conscious affirmation of the laws of addition before then moving up to multiplication and then to algebra, and so on, by the time that any basic calculus could begin, it would be time to go to bed. We should be very thankful that we don’t have to start at the beginning very often. If we did, we would never be able to get very far.
The Modern philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) actually attempted to engage in something akin to our thought-experiment above.
Descartes is the thinker famous for suggesting that “cogito ergo sum” (usually translated as “I think, therefore I am”). Well, he came to this conclusion as a result of trying to engage in systematic doubt in order to try to find something that he could know with absolute certainty. The problem with such a method of radical doubt is that one of the things that had to be doubted was your memory. So, Descartes decided that only those thoughts that he could keep in mind in a constant flow could be trusted. The worry was that when he would go to bed, when he woke up he couldn’t be sure that what he had concluded the day before actually was right and not simply a flawed memory as a result of some metaphysical deception. Accordingly, he would read through his arguments each day from the beginning of his methodological process in order to catch up to where he already was the day before, in order, then, to push just a bit further. Then, he would do the same thing the next day in order to go a bit further still.
Thankfully, we do not have to share Descartes’s fear of such a robust skepticism attending all of our thinking. Nonetheless, reflecting a bit about the relation of habits and norms is an important exercise in order that we do not fall into a situation whereby we think that what we “normal” is simply “natural,” “obvious,” or “necessary.” It is when we appreciate the contingency of what we have allowed to become habitual and what we find ourselves understanding as normal that we begin to live intentionally in light of the kind of beings that we are.
Here is the thing we have to realize and remember:
Norms norm us.
They frame what we take for granted.
What we take for granted then becomes so deeply assumed that it becomes invisible to our reflective efforts.
When we appreciate this fact, such that we are aware of the water in which we swim and the air in which we fly, so to speak, we can better focus on what habits are worth forming in the first place.
So, there with those high school drummers, I worked to create a norm that allowed them to become not only better players, but players who could march in formation once that was required of them later in the season.
I don’t stay in touch with many of those former high school friends. I mean, it has been almost 30 years since I graduated from high-school, sheesh. But I can say that for me, it is almost impossible for me not to move my feet in time whenever I hear music (and especially when I play it – I became a professional session drummer after high-school and to this day I still always have my left foot tapping the beat on the high-hat no matter the style of music I am playing).
As just one more quick example of how habits become norms that then frame how our behavior develops think about seatbelts. I don’t know if you had to take “driver’s ed,” but I did. The first thing that we learned was to put on our seatbelt as soon as we entered the car. It was not an option. It was mandatory. Before the engine could be started, the seatbelt had to be on. To this day I can’t get in a car without putting my seatbelt on before starting the engine.
It is simply automatic. (Not the transmission, I still prefer manual, but the behavior).
There is another layer to think about at the intersection of habit and “marking time” that is also compelling to me. When we mark time, not as a literal tapping of our feet, but as a means of habitually acknowledging the temporal (and limited) nature of our existence, we can also make a habit of being intentional about living on purpose given where we find ourselves.
I am not in high school anymore (thank God), but my son just finished middle school yesterday and so is now, technically, a high school student.
Wow. He was like 3 yesterday. Oooof.
In light of his entering high school, I have been thinking a lot about the idea of “marking time” as a matter of appreciating where you are in light of where you have been and where you continue to hope to go. The trick is to avoid either living in nostalgia (desiring to return to a bygone era) or living in perpetual expectation for what is not yet the case (desiring to be somewhere else).
Cultivating the habit of marking time is ultimately about being ok with where you are, and with who you are, even if things are not, all things considered, ok.
It is about remembering that nothing lasts forever and that is the condition of genuine meaning-making.
It is about enacting hope without being so distracted by it that you can’t appreciate where you are.
It is about understanding where you have been without being overwhelmed by regret about former mistakes or lost in claims to one’s former grandeur.
Habitually marking time is about making today matter because it is the only thing we ever have.
Philosophers have long wrestled with the nature of time and one of the big problems is that it seems like we face an intractable problem: tomorrow is never quite here, yesterday is always already gone, and the present moment is so vanishingly short that we can’t ever be intentional or purposive about inhabiting it.
Making a habit of marking time helps us to live into what William James (1842-1910) referred to as the “specious present.” The idea is that the present is not simply an instant, but a lived framework of experience that is both propelled by memory and sustained by hope. This basic idea can also be found in Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938) theory of “internal time consciousness.” According to this view, we actually only experience anything as “retained” from the past and “protained” into the future. Returning to our high school drumline, this notion of time as a lived duration, extended in ways that are nested in our own experiential consciousness, is what makes possible the notion of melody. Only by “retaining” the earlier notes in the song can the current notes ever make sense, but only by “protention” into the future can the present notes properly relate to what is yet to come.
While admitting that James and Husserl would probably loudly protest, I think that a good way of thinking about this idea of the lived present is to think about it as “relaxed.” When we approach it this way, it gets to slow down a bit such that our life can find its pacing a bit more easily.
I was born and raised, and still live in, the Southern United States. There is a lot about the South that I wish were different, but one thing I love is that things are able to move according to a slightly more relaxed notion of time. For what it is worth, I think that it is because it is so much colder up North that people are in a hurry. When it is cold outside, you better hurry to get back indoors. When it is warm outside, you better hurry to enjoy it because winter is coming soon.
In the South, we got plenty of time to get where we are hoping to go because it will likely still be hot when we get there. And if we hurry too much, that just means that we will be drenched with sweat when we arrive. Ha!
So ya’ll, the point is that marking time is, thus, a habit worth establishing because it allows us to lean into this more relaxed present.
And yet, despite living in the South, being a philosopher who thinks a lot about living intentionally, and encouraging folks to develop habits of reflective existence, far too often I find myself feeling like the tempo of my life is set to a flawed metronome. For some reason, the tempo keeps getting quicker and quicker as the song moves forward.
It seemed like time was standing still the first couple years of my son’s life. Every day was soooooo long. He slept. He pooped. He cried. And then he went back to sleep.
But when I look at pictures of him starting middle school and now finishing it (a span of 3 years), it is like a nice 60 bpm has somehow shifted into a hurried 200bpm. Sigh.
Despite being older than I have ever been, and even though there continues to be 24 hours a day (like there was when I was in high school), time seems to be moving so quickly that I find myself desperately longing for something that allows me to be able to keep my feet moving in pace with the speed of life.
Think about the folks who were in their 40s when you were in high school. They seemed “soooo ollllldddd.” And now, in my 40s, I just don’t feel that old. And yet, when I walk with my son, I find myself being so far removed from my 18 year-old self standing on the football field moving my feet in time to the music.
Marking time is about making something normal in reflectively intentional (habitual) ways. So, as I have gotten older, the problem is that I often get out of the habit of making the passing of time something to embrace.
For example, when I first finished graduate school, my wife and I would celebrate when I got an article published. Now, though, I have published over a dozen books and hundreds of other essays. As such, I don’t even tell her about them anymore (and to be honest, I often forget many of the things I have written until I get notified that they have come out in print).
It is important that we avoid thinking that the same things should matter in the same ways throughout our life. And yet, something should matter and we should mark it as mattering with whatever time we have.
I don’t really care that my family celebrates my research or eats cake when I publish another book. But, I do care that my wife and I took our son out to eat at his favorite restaurant, Rocky’s Hot Chicken, and then got ice cream.
I don’t miss high school.
I don’t even miss playing drums as much as I used to.
I don’t miss such things because they were appropriate for a time and now other things are.
But watch this . . .
Now, I don’t (ever) miss seeing my son’s concerts when he plays drums.
Now, I don’t (ever) miss celebrating his achievements.
Now, I don’t (ever) miss encouraging him not to miss out on where he is and why it matters.
That is a tempo to which I am very happy to keep tapping my foot.
That is a habit of marking time that I am very happy to make normal.
Thank you all so very much for marking time with me as we think together here on Philosophy in the Wild. Drop a comment with examples of what you do to make your present a bit more “relaxed” such that you mark time with those you love in ways that allow today not to be tomorrow’s regret.
Also, please share this post with others so that we can grow this community together.
Thanks for this great reminder! - (“It is important that we avoid thinking that the same things should matter in the same ways throughout our life.”) I am constantly working to let go of the things that I have held in some way as historical or static “absolutes” to remain in the flow of life and James’ “spacious present.” It reminds me of Heraclitus’s wisdom in that “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Also, Carl Jung’s exhortation that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” What am I swimming in!? - As always, thanks for this!
He I Me I Owe
Old Macdonald
Played with norms,
He didn’t take for granted
That what we do
and what we see
are always as they shad be
He disturbed our standards
And our assumptions
By pushing on them all
And like a feline Siamese
He marveled whence each did fall
Ill remember that funny farmer
As long I walk these fields
And ponder What and Why
Over our cultivated yields