Many of Smith’s reflections are grounded in snippets of his personal journey recovering a sense of spiritual locatedness in his own story. These snippets proceed to join the musings of several thinkers, artists, and disciplines—from Heidigger and Niebuhr to some contemporary surprises like Brandi Carlile. Smith samples far and wide as he illustrates different aspects of what it means to be creaturely; the range is such that an individual reader’s mileage will likely vary as the text moves between inflection points. For example, I was struck as Smith recounted his awakening to new philosophical curiosities while taking account of his personal history in psychotherapy. Conversely, a section that makes extensive reference to the study and preservation of whale skeletons left me colder, my imagination relatively inert.

But the areas of weakness in my experience of the text may well resonate strongly for another reader, which speaks to the overall versatility of what Smith has assembled in How to Inhabit Time. If nothing else, each turn in the book’s arc feels like an authentic expression of Smith’s own distinct voice and reflective process, which lends a compelling coherence to the text even if a minority of pit stops feel more distracting than enlightening. Any reader of Smith’s previous work will see a clear throughline from his interest in habit and liturgy to his present engagement with temporal awareness. This node of the throughline is perhaps the most abstract, but Smith rarely loses sight of the physical, ground-level implications that emerge from grappling with abstraction—a characteristic of his previous writing that is on equally strong display here.

What is most inspiring about this journey is Smith’s ardent belief that the discipline of spiritual timekeeping is not ultimately oriented toward a “boxing in” of human potential; instead, it seeks to discover and lean into all of the genuine possibilities of our existence. The God of eternity is the same God who made creatures living within time, who—though they never cease proceeding through time—do not experience this journey with the kind of clarity that certain Sunday school songs train us to expect. The limitations of temporality need not put a stranglehold on human ambition, but we do need imaginations that spring from a grasp of our state. Smith makes the cultivation of such an imagination seem not only possible, but deeply desirable, an accomplishment in and of itself given the sea of contradictions this topic might evoke in less capable hands. I certainly didn’t leave the book with any hard and fast answers about how I ought to relate to time (read: my own finitude), but it did unearth a renewed sensitivity to the building blocks of that relationship, to aspects of my being that easily get buried beneath the hustle and bustle of daily life. This deepening is the primary invitation of How to Inhabit Time—one that implicitly asks to be accepted and reaccepted over a span of days, months, and years. In this, it mirrors the journey of a life of faith, orienting its own idiosyncratic circularity toward eternity.