Why do we have to beat time?

buddha standard time

As modern man, we are obsessed with beating the time. The results are time-saving technologies and devices that are appearing at exponential rate and individual time-schedules that are cramme-packed with more and more activities either business or personal. At the end of each day, each week, each month and each year, we look back and ask 'Where has all the time gone?'
In his book Buddha Standard Time, Lama Surya Das offers the following insight on human's obsession with beating time:-

Can we turn this moment into eternity?

We keep moving forward, doing and accomplishing things, rather than just being. We are human beings, after all, not human doings. It costs us dearly to live only on the linear axis of time. We lose connection with our deeper and most authentic selves, too often mistaking mere movement for purpose and meaning. We adapt to a faster and faster tempo that keeps us feeling busy, but rarely with a sense of accomplishment. Staggering forward on a treadmill of events, we gather momentum until we lose any sense of how to stop.
Isn't this a pitiful state for us to be in? Our relationship to time - here and now - should be multi-dimensional,
with our inner self, with our fellow beings, and with nature. Instead, almost every moment of our waking life we are hurtling ourselves forward at endless projected goals big or small, short-term or long-term, spiritual or mundane. Doesn't this remind one of a donkey pulling a mill stone with a pair of blinkers over his eyes thinking he is getting somewhere or achieving something at the end of it all?
Within the Buddhist tradition, there is a meditation technique called Zhi Guan meaning 'stopping' and 'watching'. One has to stop running or doing whatever he's doing in order to whatch, observe what's really going on. In the practice of Tai Chi form, it's important for the practitioner to 'listen' to his body and the movement of Chi within. If one goes to a concert (classic, not rock), one has to sit quietly and listen. There won't be any possibility of enjoying the performance if one keeps making noises by chatting away or shouting. Yet in reality that's what most of us do - creating noises by keeping busy, and sadly enough those noises we call life!