Time to Spare

Time to Spare is a short book by Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College, published in 1949. It grew out of a postwar America in which labor-saving technology promised leisure but seemed to deliver only greater busyness, and out of Steere's conviction that the real problem was not a shortage of hours but a poverty of attention. The book belongs to the tradition of Quaker writing on the interior life, and it was addressed to ordinary people living hurried lives rather than to specialists in prayer.

Steere's central argument is that our difficulty with time is a spiritual difficulty. Busyness, he suggests, is often a way of avoiding ourselves and God, and the cure is not simply more free time but a different way of inhabiting the time we have. He draws a distinction between time that is merely filled and time that is open, and he commends the habit of leaving margins in a life, small stretches of unclaimed attention in which something can be received rather than accomplished. Drawing on the Christian mystics and on figures such as Brother Lawrence, he describes prayer and silence as practices that reorder desire rather than add one more task to an overloaded schedule. Throughout, he insists that contemplation and action are not rivals: the person who has learned to be still is the one best able to give full attention to others, to work, and to the demands of the present moment. The book is more suggestive than systematic, moving by reflection and example rather than by method.

The book has endured because the condition it diagnoses has only intensified. Where Steere wrote of the radio and the pace of postwar commerce, readers now face devices that make every pause an opportunity for distraction, and his claim that attention is the heart of the matter reads as more pressing than it did in 1949. His gentle tone, free of scolding, has also kept the book useful: he invites rather than commands, and he treats restlessness as a hunger to be understood rather than a vice to be shamed.

Who should read this: busy believers, pastors, and caregivers who suspect that their activity has outrun their inner life and want a calm, humane voice to help them reconsider how they spend their attention. It is a good first book on the contemplative life for someone who finds the great mystical texts forbidding. It is not for readers seeking a rigorous theology of time, a step-by-step program of prayer, or practical productivity advice; its aim is to turn the reader's gaze, not to supply techniques.