This is an heirloom piece which I leave up for the time being. Enjoy!

Once when I was a teen and roaming around broke, thumbing rides everywhere, I spent a night sleeping rough in a field, in deep frost, in a tiny Scottish hamlet called Ecclefechan. The sign as you entered the village said “Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle”. As I shivered my way back to life next morning, I wondered who this dude was. Now I know!

Time Is Your Capital

Time is probably our most precious asset. The whole secret to personal success is how you “spend” your time (see: we even talk of it like it was money!)

If you are business, time is the key to profits. Think about it: if it were not for time, you could do all the tasks yourself; you wouldn’t need the expense of employees. Then leverage, the real key to great success, is also a function of time: how to get the most action out of a given unit of time. Leverage simply means to multiply the result that could be obtained by one person alone.

Residual income is another function of time: the idea of doing a task only once and then being able to sell or profit from it many times over, through time.

OK, if I’ve got your attention a little, let me introduce Thomas Carlyle…

Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) was a bit of a grumpy old fart. But he wrote some good stuff; some very good stuff! Here’s one of his famous maxims, “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

You could argue this was a Victorian version of “living in the now”!

Sir William Osler, a Canadian physician who rose to be Britain’s leading doctor of the Empire and therefore, arguably, one of the most important figures of his time, attributes his success to that one saying of Carlyle’s. Osler organised the world-famous Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He became Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford – the highest honor that can be bestowed upon any medical man in the British Empire and eventually he was knighted by the King of England. When Osler died, two huge volumes containing 1,466 pages were required to tell the story of his life.

But what of Carlyle? Coming from a strict Scottish Calvinist family, young Thomas was expected to become a preacher by his parents, but while at the University of Edinburgh he lost his Christian faith. Instead he became writer and orator of great skill. His combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity, made Carlyle’s work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order.

He understood so well the 10^th of my Channels of Being (history): “In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.” Today we have the Internet and electronic retrieval but, for Carlyle, books were the investiture of our history and Being.

Interestingly, he also understood the place of Muhammad in Mankind’s history. The founder of Islam was, to Carlyle, a hero of the Arthurian kind and he included The Prophet in his book, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History”, describing Mohammad as a Hegelian agent of reform, insisting on his sincerity and commenting ‘how one man single-handedly, could weld warring tribes and wandering Bedouins into a most powerful and civilized nation in less than two decades.’

He was clearly wasn’t thinking of the 20th century but the time when Moslem cities had all the best universities and best thinkers of the world; places like Granada and Cordoba, and thinkers like Avicenna, Maimonides (Jewish) and Rumi (Persian).

Carlyle’s hero figures are markedly flawed. Perfection he considered unreal and in his view a man should be judged by his overall worth, not in nitpicking over his faults.

Just as well, because Carlyle himself was a flawed genius. While being the most high-minded devotee of the ideal, he was nevertheless, at times, churlish and uncharitable to the work and personalities of others — even to such a great writer as Charles Lamb. He was the most vociferous and ungracious of grumblers and, apparently, despite loving his wife, he made her life with him a torment. He didn’t want slaves to be freed and considered democracy a waste of time!

Even so, his reputation remains fast. He was a great thinker in a truly great age. It has been argued that Carlyle’s critique of ideological formulas in “The French Revolution” provides a good account of the ways in which revolutionary cultures turn into repressive dogmatisms.

Vocabulary

Carlyle invented some good words and phrases. I like this one especially: “Centre of Immensities”, an expression of his to signify that wherever any one is, he or she is in touch with the whole universe of being, and is, if he or she knew it, as near the heart of it there as anywhere else a person can be.

And what about: “Present Time” or “The Now”, defined by Carlyle as “the youngest born of Eternity, child and heir of all the past times, with their good and evil, and parent of all the future with new questions and significance,” on the right or wrong understanding of which depend the issues of life or death.

Actually, this last is a derivative of another monstrously vast idea: “The Conflux of Eternities”. This is Carlyle’s expressive phrase for the now time, in which the vast eternity of the past meets—or becomes confluent with—the even vaster eternity of the future. But this moment, the now, for Carlyle, is not just a fleeting evanescent experience; it is a vast edifice, standing at the confluence of All-Times and on which all our lives are built and the world shaped.

The now is a factory, which produces our hopes, lives, aspirations and heritage. From it we build all reality. So for him it has massive, sacred significance. To squander or abuse the now is the most heinous crime in his mind-set. That’s probably Calvinism speaking too: the hatred of trivialities such as music, art and human love.

But making the NOW work for us is something we can all appreciate.

Living the now to the fullest possible expression is accordingly the first and most sacred duty of every successive age, and especially the leaders of it. He bows to the future and honors the past but speaks from the present, which is the only cord or link by which we are attached to eternity.

And finally, he gave us “Hallowed Fire”, an expression of the abundant fecund energies of a movement like Christianity “at its rise and spread” as sacred, and kindling what was sacred and divine in man’s soul, and burning up all that was not.

This is the inspiration for my phrase “fire for the soul”, as in food for the mind and fire for the soul! I too share Carlyle’s vision that nothing is as vibrant, exciting, filled with potential and fiery energy as that which is inspired and new. The new flame bursts on the world and consumes in its burning passion all that is staid, mediocre and unchanging.

Hallowed Fire is the cleansing fire that keeps our world young and alive! Let’s have more of it. That’s how movements and religions are born!

Anyway, this piece isn’t about Carlyle. Nor, indeed, is it about Sir William Osler. But it’s time we went back to him.

Daytight Compartments

Those of you who know much of my mind power and spiritual writings will have met the term “mini day” or “action bites” (see my piece “Slices Of Eternity”). There is the germ of that idea in the writings of Sir William Osler.

The secret of Osler’s success he attributed to living in what he called “daytight compartments.” What did he mean by that?

Shutting out distractions and focusing on just one day at a time: today! Osler compared it to ship technology. At sea, the master of the vessel can operate watertight bulkheads, which seal off parts of the ship. It didn’t work with the Titanic because the designer, foolishly, did not have bulkheads all the way to the next deck above: water was able to spill over the bulkheads into the next compartment, then the next, and so on…

In fact, in a way, the Titanic is a reverse example of this principle. If you don’t live by daytight compartments, you may sink! See what you think when you’ve finished reading!

Using this model, you will see that raising the aft bulkhead against past miseries and defeats will insulate you for your work today; raising the forward bulkhead against the blurry, unfocused future will stop you being distracted and your energy dispersed by too many attractive possibilities, most of which will never come to pass, no matter how appealing.

There’s a time for reflection and dreaming about the future. But when you are supposed to be in action, making stuff happen, is not that time!

When you need to act—do it! Just do it!

See also my post: Don’t Let The Future Kill The Now. It’s about the “reverse gap”.