Great Circle

The Lilliputians in “Gulliver’s Travels”, remember those little guys?

At one stage of the story, they note that Gulliver’s pocket watch is probably a god. This is because he rarely did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle and said it appointed the time for every action of his life.

“Travels” was written over 200 years ago. [Great book by the way!]. This was a comment about the “modern” preoccupation with time. But has anything changed in 200 years? Gulliver sure sounds like me sometimes: preoccupied with routines and deadlines.

Of course, life wouldn’t flow so well if we DIDN’T keep some kind of order to it and use time well.

Still, our preoccupation with time is one of the factors contributing to our life of hurry hurry hurry. I like this quote from Carl Honore’s incredible book, In Praise of Slow:

“The toll taken by the Hurry-up Culture is well-rehearsed. We are driving the planet and ourselves toward burnout. We are so time-poor and time-sick that we neglect our friends, families and partners. We barely know how to enjoy things anymore because we are always looking ahead to the next thing…

“(E)ach of us should try to make room for Slowness. A good place to start is with reassessing our relationship with time … Try to think of time not as a finite resource that is always draining away [ouch! I need to reconsider my opinion on this, given what I have written about it], nor as a bully to be feared or conquered, but as the benign element we live in. Stop living every moment as if Frederick Taylor [inventor of the Time and Motion philosophy] were hovering nearby, checking his stopwatch and tut-tutting over his clipboard…”

Feeling hurried? Stressed? Take a deep breath. Let it out slow. Go to a window and focus on something far away from where you are. If your “horizon” is the next office building 30 feet away from you, head out to a park in your lunch break and do “nothing”.

May Time once again become our environment, rather than our mean and demanding god.