The Clock Keeper Chronicles: Part II

What This Is

The Clock Keeper Chronicles is a two-part project. Part I is an essay — a meditation on time, attention, and the strange experience of watching your own life from the outside. Part II is this: five questions that function as a container for your response to that essay, or to the larger questions it raises.

The questions are not an intellectual challenge. They are not a quiz with correct answers. They are an invitation to articulate something that may not yet have words — your relationship with time, with the pace of your life, with the things you are postponing and the things you are rushing toward. The form is simple. The content is yours.

The Five Questions

The questions move from the concrete to the abstract. They begin with how you actually spend your time — the observable facts of your days — and move toward the harder questions: what you are protecting, what you are afraid of, and what you would do differently if you believed you had less time than you think.

Tony Greenberg developed this project from his own experience of time pressure — the particular quality of attention that comes from having more things you want to do than time to do them, and the discipline required to choose well rather than simply react. The Clock Keeper is the part of you that knows the difference between urgency and importance, and is trying to get your attention.

How to Use This

Read Part I first. Then come here. Take as long as you need with each question. The responses are not scored or evaluated. They are offered as a record — a moment of honest accounting that you can return to. Some people find that writing the answers is the point. Others find that the questions themselves are enough.