Four Thousand Weeks
It’s a best-selling book from 2021, Four Thousand Weeks, with the subtitle “Time Management for Mortals.” If you live to be 80 years old, your life will have had about 4,000 weeks. Put that way, a human life seems pathetically short particularly over against the wide range of things we feel we could do, and want to do. There’s never enough time to do what I want! Oliver Burkeman, the author, invites us to take limitations, human finitude, seriously. We are built to have more capacities than we can turn into actions and products. We are built to desire to do more than we are capable of doing. Wisdom begins with the realization: we are mortals. We are called to accept that we cannot do everything, and there is no time-management-system that can fix our problem.
Indeed, it’s not really a problem; it’s just who we are.
We are finite.
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Here’s a random quote (from page 98): “The hopelessness of the world I encountered online began to seep into the world of the concrete. It was impossible to drink from Twitter’s fire hose of anger and suffering—of news and opinions selected for my perusal precisely because they weren’t the norm, which was what made them especially compelling—without starting to approach the rest of my life as if they were the norm, which meant being constantly braced for confrontation or disaster, or harboring a nebulous sense of foreboding. Unsurprisingly, this rarely proved to be the basis for a fulfilling day.”
The point in this chapter (which is called “The Watermelon Problem”) is that, given the finitude of our life, there might be more fulfilling and lasting things for us to do besides “spending time” on “feeds” and the like: things that, when we’re done, leave us with a sense of fulfilment.
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I like the book—although, let me confess, I only skimmed it. It made me realize afresh that my own life-span is finite. Do I have a thousand weeks still in my future (i.e. 20 years)? Or maybe five hundred? Or? Whatever it is, I don’t have the time to read this book. I will take the point and return the book to the library. Someone else wants it, and I have other things to do.
With my finite time.
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Psalm 90 has long been a favorite. It has the line, “The span of our life is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty.” In the older Prayer Books we find the language that inspired the opening of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, * yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.” This Psalm encourages us to number our days, so that by doing so we may learn wisdom.
Numbering our weeks, as Burkeman does, is a poignant reminder of our finitude. And it is wisdom to realize one’s finitude. Being finite, we need to realize that the problem is deeper than the avoidance of “wasting” time, because there is more to us than what is measured in time. There is more to you than what you do with the time you have. Given our rather severely limited time (in comparison with the potentialities), who you are is much more important than what you do.
From skimming Four Thousand Weeks and perusing its index, it seems that the Jewish and Christian grounding perspective is, unsurprisingly, absent. Unsurprising: because a biblical exposition of our finitude as creatures of our omnipotent God would not be a best-seller. Nonetheless, nothing is wiser than to know that our days are numbered. Of most importance in our lives are acts of love, and they bring about the greatest satisfaction.
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Out & About. The first four 2025 “Good Books & Good Talk” seminars are scheduled for the last Sunday of the month, from January through April, each seminar being from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. We will start with:
January 26: “Hamlet” by a certain Wm. Shakespeare.
February 23: Where Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head.
March 23: Parts of a World by A. G. Motjabai.
If you read any of these books, you are welcome to join the seminar on the respective evenings.