What "Momo" Taught Me About Taking Back My Own Time

Michael Ende's Momo is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. I had always assumed it was a children's book — I knew the title, kept meaning to read it, and let several decades go by before finally opening it during my second summer of retirement. What struck me on finishing it was that this is a guide to growing old, wearing the face of a children's story. It is a book about having your time stolen, about taking it back, and about quietly insisting, right to the last page, that time is life itself.

Inspired by the ruined amphitheatre on the edge of town where the story is set. A quiet place belonging to no one becomes the starting point for reclaiming one's time.

One step, one breath, one sweep

The passage that stayed with me longest comes from Beppo, an old street sweeper. Faced with a very long road, he says, people panic, work faster and faster, and end up out of breath with the road still ahead of them. That, he insists, is the wrong way.

"You must never think of the whole street at once … only of the next step, the next breath, the next sweep of the broom." — Michael Ende, Momo

Since reading that, I've changed how I write my morning list. I used to put down everything that occurred to me, then feel low all day looking at the lines that never got crossed off. Now I limit the day to three items and move the rest to a separate sheet. For blog posts I sit down having decided that today I'll write one section only.

Oddly enough, I end those days less tired. The next step, the next breath, the next sweep — a street sweeper's method turned out to be exactly the right pace for a body that doesn't keep going as long as it used to.

Offering the act of listening

The heroine of this story has no magic and no power. What she has is the ability to listen. When she sits quietly and pays attention, the person talking arrives at an answer they didn't know they had. She gives no advice and no encouragement, yet people change in front of her.

"What little Momo could do, and nothing more, was listen to other people. … But people who can truly listen are rare." — from the same book

It's easy to read past that — surely anyone can listen. Held up against my own habits, though, it turned out I couldn't. After reading it, I began practising not running ahead of people. When my wife starts describing a problem, I used to reach straight for a solution. Now I listen to the end, say only "and how did that feel?", and go quiet again. The conversation runs much longer, and quite often she arrives somewhere entirely different from the advice I had ready.

The same goes for phone calls with friends in Japan. I've stopped treating a few minutes of nothing but murmured agreement as wasted. Speaking up isn't the only form of support — sometimes simply receiving someone's words is enough to lighten how they feel. This book treats listening as exactly that kind of gift.

Deciding not to save time

The villains of the story are the men in grey. They persuade people to deposit their hours in a "timesaving bank," promising interest on everything saved. In practice the saved time never comes back. People grow irritable, hurried, and stop laughing. Slogans start running in lights on the advertising columns around town.

"Timesaving is the road to happiness!" "Save time — for a richer life!" — from the same book

Reading it, I didn't feel I was reading a fable so much as a description of now. In Japan, a term for "time performance" has entered ordinary speech, and I'm told films and books are widely consumed at double speed. Living in Britain, I run into the opposite habit daily: the afternoon tea break, long conversations in the pub about nothing in particular, an odd tolerance for standing in a queue. Measured by efficiency alone, all of it is waste.

What interests me is that the old books of both countries say the same thing. Japan's Tsurezuregusa, written in the fourteenth century, opens from a state of having nothing to do. In Britain, Bertrand Russell argued in In Praise of Idleness that overwork is what impoverishes us. Both cultures have a tradition defending unused time; the economy simply ran ahead of it.

I've applied the same thinking to money. I still invest, but I've moved the purpose from growing the total to reducing the worry. I check prices far less often — once a quarter now. Chasing yield by handing over my own attention is, I realised, precisely what depositing hours in that grey bank amounts to. The shortest route to less financial anxiety turned out to be looking at the figures less, not making them bigger.

The old sweeper's work while the town is still asleep, one stretch of road at a time. A road walked unhurriedly, in the end, carries you further.

Waiting the way a seed waits

Later in the book, the keeper of time speaks about waiting.

"You must wait as a seed waits in the earth, through one whole turn of the earth around the sun." — from the same book

Reading that, I thought of the asparagus in the garden. For the first two years you let the thin spears grow on and feed the crown rather than cutting them. Only in the third spring can you snap off a spear as thick as your finger. Three years of waiting for something that costs a couple of pounds in a shop.

Honestly, in the planting year I wondered why I'd chosen anything so inefficient. But on the morning of that first harvest, it didn't feel like I'd gained a vegetable so much as the ability to wait. Most of what I try to learn or build in the body now follows this shape: the question is whether I can keep going through the stretch where nothing shows. What I lacked when I was young wasn't ability. It was this way of waiting.

Watching the flowers bloom and sink

The most beautiful passage in the book is the one at the source of time, where a single flower rises from the water with each swing of the pendulum, opens in colours and scents beyond anything imaginable, then falls and sinks. The next flower is never the same as the one before.

"Surely this was the flower of all flowers, a miracle without equal!" "And yet this flower too passed its prime, scattered, and sank into the dark water …" — from the same book

The Buddhist phrase for the impermanence of all things came to mind. When I first learned it at school, it struck me as a bleak idea: everything passes, nothing stays. Reading it again now, the same words land completely differently. If the same flower never blooms twice, then today's flower belongs to today. When I was young, the prospect of one similar day after another felt tedious. Now what I feel is that no day comes twice. The difficulty doesn't disappear — but its meaning changes.

Others around my age may recognise the change that hit me hardest: forgetting names. A person's name, the title of a book, stuck somewhere in the throat and refusing to come out. A few years ago each occurrence felt like something being shaved off me.

Now I live on the assumption that I won't remember. I note things down as they occur to me, and once a month I shape those notes into an article. Memory in the head fades; what's written doesn't. Even as recall weakens, writing lets you go on editing your life — that's probably half the reason this blog exists. The flowers of time still sink, but the record that they bloomed remains.

The flowers that bloom and sink at the source of time. No flower comes twice, which is exactly why the one in front of you deserves a proper look.

Measuring time with the heart

At the opening of Part Two sits the passage that holds the whole book together.

"We have calendars and clocks to measure time, but that means little … because time is life itself." "And life has its dwelling place in the heart." — from the same book

The same hour stretches endlessly when you're bored and vanishes when you're absorbed. The numbers on a dial never tell you what time actually is. My way of testing this in the body is moxibustion. I set one small self-adhesive cone just below the knee and wait through the slow build of warmth and its fading away. Three minutes or so. I don't look at a clock; I know it's finished by how the heat changes.

I'm not making claims about its effects. The point is that those three minutes have become my way back into the present. Left alone, my mind shuttles between yesterday's regrets and next month's worries. While I'm following the heat — something that exists only here, only now — I'm out of that loop. Sitting there, I think: so this is what it means to measure time with the heart.

Time is something left in our keeping

Where does life come from, and where does it go? The book touches on this too. Asked directly about death, its keeper of time answers:

"If people knew what death is, they would no longer be afraid of it." "And once they were no longer afraid, no one could steal their living time from them." — from the same book

Because they fear it, people hoard their time; because they hoard it, it gets taken. The order is the reverse of what we assume. I closed the book for a while at that point.

If someone asked me now what life is, I think I'd say: it's time left in our keeping. Each of us is given a portion. It stays alive only while it genuinely belongs to us, and it dies the moment we hand it to someone else's measure. That gave me an answer to the question of what goodness is, too. Not taking time from others — and, where possible, giving a little back. Listening to someone all the way to the end is probably the smallest version of that.

Looking only at the next step, listening without interrupting, refusing to economise, waiting like a seed, watching the flowers sink, measuring the minutes by warmth. None of it is remarkable. But at this stage of life I'm finding that it's precisely the small things that work. A rich old age, I suspect, isn't about accumulating more. It's about your own time finding its way back into your hands.

The book I mentioned here:

Michael Ende, Momo

Also mentioned in this post:

Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

Kenkō, Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki (Penguin Classics)

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Michael Ende: The Man and His Era

The author was living in a hill town near Rome when he wrote this story. The clock tower and evening sky evoke the atmosphere of that period.

Michael Ende was born in 1929 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in southern Germany. His father, Edgar Ende, was a painter of visionary, dreamlike canvases who was branded a "degenerate artist" under the Nazi regime and barred from exhibiting. Ende grew up watching a father forbidden to show his work. The sense that imagination is something a state can confiscate was, I think, laid down in those years.

Called up at sixteen in the closing months of the war, Ende refused to serve, left his unit, and joined an anti-Nazi resistance group. Afterwards he turned to the theatre, spending unsettled years as an actor, drama critic, and radio writer. His name only began to spread when he was well into his thirties.

Momo appeared in 1973 — the year West Germany's post-war boom ran into the oil crisis and the assumptions underpinning it began to wobble. A society that had never questioned efficiency and growth had just been forced to stop, and out of that moment came a fable about a bank where you deposit your hours. Ende had a serious interest in economics: he was critical of money that swells without limit through interest, and felt a strong affinity with Silvio Gesell, who proposed a currency that loses value over time. When the men in grey promise interest, they are voicing his economic view, not merely a metaphor.

He wrote the book while living in Genzano, a town near Rome. The feel of the ruined amphitheatre and the cobbled lanes comes from that landscape. German speculative thought sitting alongside southern European light and the richness of aimless conversation gives the book its particular temperature.

His connection with Japan ran deep. He first visited in 1977, travelling with Mariko Sato, the translator who later became his wife. On a second visit in 1986 he stayed at his translator's family home on the Inland Sea, was invited to a tea ceremony, and reportedly picked up a Noh mask and performed a few movements on the spot. In Kyoto he joined Buddhist scholars in a serious discussion of contemporary Buddhism. He later said that without that stay he would have gone home having seen only a modernised Japan. He was, in other words, walking towards an Eastern sense of time from his own side.

Throughout his life Ende disliked being called a children's author. He wrote so that children could read him, but never diluted the content for them. Reading Momo in one's sixties makes that plain: it is a book for adults, written in words that reach children. He died of stomach cancer in 1995, at sixty-five.