Sublimating Time

We often think, "If only I had more time." If time were infinite, we could do everything we love. But no one could bear to live on for ages, and no one can concretely imagine it. Nor, of course, can anyone settle how much time would be enough.

I thought about this while reading Phoenix, Osamu Tezuka's manga epic about immortality spanning millennia. The very notion of "ages" exceeds the limits of our imagination. Even if someone says ten thousand years, it is hard to picture.

Everyone preaches that we should value our time. I find this worn-out phrase stifling, but why do people try to value time? There are three standard answers: time is finite, time cannot be increased, and time is equal for all. These answers are certainly satisfying, so obvious they hardly need explaining. Lately, though, I have come to feel they are a little naive.

I realized that time can in fact be increased, that it is not equal, and that it was infinite from the start. More than that, I began to wonder whether we even need to be so conscious of it.

Time is indeed one of the most expensive things in the world, and it yields the greatest compounding effect. Having time on your side leads everything toward a solution. Especially in the capitalist society we live in, you could say we exchange time through money. That alone lets us feel how precious time is.

In recent years people talk about taipa ("time performance", a Japanese buzzword for getting the most out of every minute), and spending time efficiently is valued above all. Ironically, even with that awareness, we get hooked on TikTok and YouTube and can't get out.

Time is worth only what you make of it, and the ways to use it are endless. The meaningful use of time I am discussing here is time spent on growth, on seeking something better than now.

Here, I thought, steadily continuing to work at something is far too underrated. In reality it is extremely important, and it means sublimation — in the chemist's sense, a solid turning directly into another form without passing through the stages in between.

It may feel as though the more you pile up, the slower you move, but continuing and steadily moving forward is not simply an image of piling up. It is chewing things over within yourself and making them part of you.

This needs no physical room to store it. So I thought it should be called not compression — squeezing more into the same space — but sublimation. It is not a process of adding something new to yourself, but of transforming what is already inside you into something else.

In other words, it is turning object A into object B. The part of me that exists now (object A) does not lie on a straight line extended toward the part of me in the future (object B). That is sublimation. When one day passes, it becomes two days. On day one and day two, you have become something different. So it is not accumulation; it is evolving into something else.

Because there is a compounding effect, sublimated matter is used for further sublimation. Object B becomes object C. In the process it becomes more refined and takes on a kind of self-replicating quality. It spreads everywhere and is passed on.

It looks linear but is exponential. What is interesting is that at first the change is small, almost imperceptible to others. But as time passes, it changes by leaps. This is happening even now.

When we think about time, we tend to picture linear continuity. Indeed, reality often looks that way. But I think that is because we believe we can control something; time is not necessarily continuous. To say time is continuous is to say it forms a line. But as I see it, time is neither a line nor a series of points. Time is a point itself — there is no continuity, there is only the present.

Through the compounding effect of time, we can raise the present to a higher value — that is, we can increase it. Depending on the degree of sublimation, time ceases to be equal. A point is both a beginning and an end. In other words, there are only points, and so time is in fact infinite. Now is a point — and there are infinitely many such small fragments. That is sublimating time. Having come this far, I begin to doubt whether we even need to be conscious of time, and to suspect we had become oversensitive to it.

You might also feel that if time seems infinite, you will slack off. You might become more likely to get hooked on Netflix or TikTok. But I think the busier you are, the more possibilities open up if you think of time as infinite. When you are pressed, you lose creative imagination. Margin matters for the brain's working memory.

The phrase "time management" presupposes that time can be controlled. Most people can't do that; isn't the only thing we can control not our surroundings but ourselves?

The only way to sublimate time is to focus not on the past or the future but on the present. By continuing to focus on the present, the future turns out better as a result. The uncut gem is already right in front of us. That is why, paradoxically, I concluded there is no need to worry about time. As the word taipa suggests, many people today worry about time far too much.

Above all, the more you think of time as finite, the more you tend to live in the future.

If you block out two hours on your schedule, you try to finish things intensively within those two hours. I'm not saying don't manage it. You have to choose the time and the situation. It works for simple tasks. But for creative work, it cuts into how far things can be sublimated. Many people have experienced good ideas refusing to come under a time limit.

The clearest example is when you are absorbed in something. Looking back, it seems both fast and slow, both an instant and an eternity. That strange sensation erases the very concept of time. Through absorption, we forget that time exists and simply focus on what is in front of us. That is sublimating time in the true sense.

Most of us are ordinary people, and unless we work at something day to day, we cannot bring out our abilities. Even if one day happens to go well, we can get carried away and lose our sense of balance. Picturing the future ten years from now is exciting, but when it is overrated, reality becomes bland. The gap between ideal and reality is discouraging, too.

If that is how you feel, I think you should suspect that you are not living in reality. At such times, you should get to work on the problem in front of you right away. To bring out any ability, you have to train it every day.

The future matters. There is hope there. But like the North Star, it serves as a guide, not a destination. Try to make it a goal and you lose sight of the path. What matters is to keep it in mind without overthinking, and to focus on your footing. In every age and every place, West and East alike, people have stressed the importance of balance. This is no exception.

Sublimating time means, above all, living each day all the way through. It comes down to nothing but how you spend each day. It looks like simple accumulation, but it is a process of sublimation, and beyond it something extraordinary is sure to be waiting.