If you’re an averagely busy person – job, kids, meals to prepare, vendettas with noisy neighbours to conduct – you might not take kindly to the suggestion that you should learn life lessons from monks or nuns. Hidden away in a monastery, freed from the obligations of family or mortgages or bosses who email at 11pm, who couldn’t adopt a more serene existence? But bear with me. Consider the story of Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun. (It’s recounted in a new book, Driven To Distraction At Work, on finding focus at the office.) Talking with eager novice nuns at her convent, Chittister recalls, she’d ask them: “Why do we pray?” Their pious answers were all about praising God. “No,” the older nun eventually answered. “We pray because the bell rings.” You can talk lofty principles all you like, but it’s structure – designating time for something, then doing it – that gets things done.
“Because the bell rings”: that’s a succinct summary of the approach to time expressed in the Rule of St Benedict, the sixth-century document most Christian orders still use to govern their days. The Rule divides the monastic day into allotted periods – for solitary prayer, communal worship, work, recreation, sleep – with the boundary between each signalled by bells. Being a devoted monk or nun is less about the intensity of your worship than dignified obedience to the bell. “When the bell announces that something else needs to be tackled now,” writes the Catholic scholar Wil Derkse, “you lay down one thing, and you begin something else… Benedictine working means first of all the turning away of attention to what is past [then] attending to what needs to be done presently.” Why this particular activity, right now? Because the bell rings.
This might sound oppressive, but in fact Benedict is almost comically pragmatic and forgiving. (On the subject of alcohol, his sardonic sigh echoes down the centuries: “We read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately.”) Benedictine time management isn’t about slavish adherence, but attempting – however imperfectly – to embody an ethos. No task is considered less worthy of attention than any other, so even mundane tasks take on a deeper meaning. You needn’t feel “in the mood” for anything; you just do it when it’s time. And there’s no need to race to meet goals; each time you drop an activity, you know you’ll be returning to it soon.
If you still think you couldn’t infuse a little of this spirit into your hectic life, here’s Tracey Thorn, the musician, writing recently in the New Statesman about her mother-in-law, who raised triplets. How on earth, Thorn wondered, did she get three newborns to stick to any kind of sleep schedule? I suspect Benedict might have approved of her reply: “Well, when it was nap time, I put them all in their cots and locked the door,” she said, “until it wasn’t nap time any more.”
• Oliver Burkeman will be speaking at a Guardian Live event, Buying Happiness, with Philippa Perry and others, on 18 May at Conway Hall, London WC1.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
