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‘I hate my mum’s phone and I wish she never had one.’ Those are the bitter words of a seven year old girl whose teacher had asked her to name an item she wished had never been invented. Like many of her classmates, she chose the phone. That girl is jealous because her mum appears so bound up in tweeting and texting and emailing that she has no time left for her, and this week her poignant reflection went viral on the internet. The problem is the pressure that so many of us place on time. It is too easy to view time as a commodity that needs to be exploited to the full. We can end up cramming every single second with activity so there is no space left in our lives at all. The Pope has invented a word for this tendency ever to increase the pace of life. He calls it rapidification. And because a faster pace of life means ever great consumption of the world’s finite resource, he suggests that the pressure we are putting on time has become a critical issue for the future of the planet. It may be that an eighth century Saint can pour some wisdom into this very contemporary conundrum. I was fortunate enough to spend some of this past week on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Bede, the remarkable monk and scholar whose feast Christians keep today. Bede had a fascination with time. He monitored the tides, he watched the movements of the moon and stars, and many hold him responsible for the way in which in the West the years have been numbered in relation to Jesus Christ. But Bede had a very different understanding of the purpose of time. For him time was not a commodity to fill up but a means of marking out the spaces where he could meet with God. It was a way of ensuring that life was fitted around a daily pattern of prayer and an annual calendar of seasons and festivals that told the story of Jesus. The purpose of time was to encounter the timelessness of God and in so doing to discover human identity. Maybe there is something in Bede’s thinking that can help us all. Rather than seeing time as something we have to fill up and exploit to the maximum, perhaps we might begin see it as the space in which relationships can be fed and human purpose explored. Empty time is good time. Being with those who are close to us is time well spent. This Bank holiday weekend, why not lose the phone, slow down and waste some time with the people you love. Who knows, you might even be helping to save the planet.