We're trapped in our conception of time.
In the book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman argues that we have become so entrenched in our conception of time that we’re like the proverbial fish that has no idea what water is because they are completely surrounded by it. We think about time as an absolute system that judges and measures our tasks and activities and there's no way to escape it.
Time wasn’t always a beating drum, forcing us to work faster and harder.
Before there were clocks, time was more fluid, oriented around tasks that needed to be done and the rising and setting of the sun. There was no pressure to “get everything done” because work wasn't just a task that needed to get done as fast as possible. Life was infinite work.
Burkeman argues that, “living this way, one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Peasant farmers might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him.”
Even today, there are still moments when we can taste what it must have felt like to not experience time.
In my life, I've experienced this timelessness when I've gone backcountry camping. Out there, with no cell reception in the deep woods, you no longer operate on time. Instead, you operate on tasks - cooking, setting up your tent, collecting water, with no sense of time or rush to complete tasks. You get a taste of what Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest calls “living in deep time” and what writer Gary Eberle says, "we slip into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world.”
Sounds nice, doesn't it?