It's been a long time coming, but over the past three years, I have decided that I (and my young son) will live our lives to our own rhythm...
We wake when we wake, we eat when we are hungry, I don't make early morning appointments, I work when I feel the internal drive, we get to school when we get to school...
There is no past and no future - there is only the NOW and I have consciously decided I/we will "spend" or use the now in a manner that is meaningful to me/us...
Part of that outlook comes from my very strong dislike of being "controlled".
Part of it comes from the realisation that most of us live like mice on the wheel, with the content and quality of our lives dictated by the needs to work for our 'living', by what we have to do in selling our labour or thinking skills to "earn", to prove we deserve, the necessities of life...
We have agreed to give away our sovereignty to the system. Our daily lives are dictated by the needs of our employers - managers and businesses. Our kids are programmed in factory-model schools to comply with and conform to the demands of the workforce, so they'll willingly shape their lives to the requirements of the workplace...
I used to work all hours of the day and night for various jobs. As a radio journalist/news editor I had shifts starting at 4.00am and others finishing at 2.00am... And I'd get home not remembering the route I had driven - had I stopped for that red light? How did I get around that roundabout? Freaky, scary to find yourself having travelled 10 miles with no memory of the journey...
I did my whole first marriage and the raising of my first family on "auto-pilot"... head down, bum up... get up at 6am, fed and clothe the kids, get them to school, work, pick them up from school, take them to music or swimming or art classes, feed them dinner, bath time, bed time, fold washing, go to bed and get up next morning and do it all over again... work, housework, childcare, kids' activities, social life, volunteering, birthdays, christmas, haircuts, doctors' and dentists' appointments, illnesses, family crises, build houses, renovate houses, move all over the country... don't stop to think, don't stop to feel, don't stop to question, don't stop to breathe, just do what needs to be done...
I watched my second husband (a very brief marriage!), a man of 50 at the time, completely freak out at the possibility of being late, even by a few minutes, for his factory-floor job. He was reduced to the emotional state of a panic-stricken child if anything came up that might make him late - like a child scared of getting a 'tardy slip' at school and being hauled in front of the principal, or being expelled. It was horrible to watch - humiliating and dehumanising...
And lastly, I watched my mother work hard at multiple jobs all her life, only to suffer a stroke at 32, and to drop dead at the age of 60 - still working to pay a mortgage and having never had the time to enjoy the fruits of her labours...
Is that why we are each born? Is that what life as a fully evolved, fully realised human BEING (rather than a human DOING) looks like? I say no...
The sky won't fall and the earth won't stop spinning on its axis if we stay home because it's been snowing overnight and the roads are icy. Winter and its weather are nature's way of saying to all living things - time to slow down, time to go within...
Most other living things on the planet live in that natural rhythm, natural cycle - they hunker down when the weather becomes inhospitable...
But do we humans? Oh no - not us, all powerful, all arrogant, lords and masters of all we survey...
We're above having to live by nature's dictates - we try to control nature and when we can't, we simply ignore her and bulldoze our way through, regardless of the consequences.
And what does that bring us? Nothing really - except more demands from our bosses and society that we operate like robots, like machines and not like living, breathing, conscious flesh and blood.
Had a death in the family? Three days is plenty of time to deal with the logistics of the funeral and the wake... What, two weeks later and you're still not functioning fully? Grow a backbone, stop being such a wimp, get over it...
Indigenous people have a very different concept of time - they live life to a different rhythm...
In many cultures, there is only the eternal NOW... there is no future, so planning for the future is an entirely alien concept...
"In Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, a Quechua Indian told me that everything one does in life involves looking forward while going backward simultaneously. This I didn’t understand. I said, ‘What do you mean, going backward?’ And he said,’Well, it’s very simple. For us, for the Quechua, the past is in front of us. It’s in front of us because we know the past and we can look at it. And the future is behind because we don’t know what it brings so we move into the future, but we move backwards.’ The expression is ñawpaman puni. This idea of moving into the future while looking clearly into the past is something that is lacking in all these considerations about development and alternatives to development, and about what is going to happen and from where we can create an alternative to development. This lack of historical depth is what is going to prevent us from thinking of real alternatives to development. (David Tuchsneider 1992:63-64)"
From: Sense of Place and Indigenous People’s Conservation A Brief Political Ecology of the Seed and Place. From Modernization to Globalization from Above and from Below. Towards the strengthening & re-indigenization of local epistemologies, ontologies and cosmovisions: Tirso Gonzales. UC-Berkeley 04/30/04
In the video below, Professor Philip Zimbardo describes how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
One of the people who influenced my social activist thinking was Robert Theobald, for whom I helped to create a public forum in Brisbane, Australia in 1999 (The Great Australian Chin Wag).
Robert was an economist and futurist, with a global or planetary perspective. He wrote books, prepared and appeared on broadcasts and lectured around the world to governments, businesses and organizations.
Robert questioned and criticized conventional confidence in economic growth, in technology, and in the culture of materialism - all of which he considered to be damaging to the environment while failing to provide opportunity and income for many of the world's people. He warned against trying to maintain, and to spread or mimic worldwide, the American standard of living of the late 20th century.
Despite his criticism of some aspects and effects of technology, Robert saw tremendous potential in communications technology like on-line, personal computers (which in the 1980s he termed "micro-computers"), seeing these as tools for pooling the thoughts and opinions of very large numbers of individuals spread widely, geographically. He was an expositor and populariser of such now-accepted concepts as "networking," "win/win," "systemic thinking," and "communications era."
Amongst the things he said was:
- "What's startling to me is that when I started talking about ideas like these 30 years ago, they were so new and strange that people looked at me as if I had two heads. In retrospect, I think I was looked on as something of a cultural clown - a "crazy" who was fun to listen to. The reaction I get now worries me a lot more, because what most people say is "Bob, today you're right, but we're not going to do anything about it."'
- "My goal is to create a situation of full unemployment--a world in which people do not have to hold a job. And I believe that this kind of world can actually be achieved."
- -Robert Theobald
Think about it - how do you want to spend the TIME OF YOUR LIFE?
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