Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Kurt Vonnegut, Harpers Magazine, September 1996, Page 26

I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil.

Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I’ll send you the pages.”

Then I go down the Steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.”  And I say, “Hush.”

So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter.

I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her.  One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

Michel, Quoist From Staffan Linder.  The Increasing Scarcity of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970

Good-by Sir, excuse me, I haven’t time.

I’ll come back, I can’t wait, I haven’t time.

I must end this letter—I haven’t time.

I’d love to help you, but I haven’t time

I can’t accept, having no time.

I can’t think, I can’t read, I’m swamped, I haven’t time

I’d like to pray, but I haven’t time.

Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy, New York, 1976:  ISBN 0195073460, Page 194

The 7.9 minutes a day we spend on average in walking, hiking, playing outdoors, and engaging in active   is less than a third of the 28.5 minutes a day western Europeans devote to those activities, and the disparity is even greater in the time we (3.3 minutes) and they (16.8 minutes) devote to gardening and pets.  Visits to cafes and pubs take up 2.7 minutes of our day, 7 minutes of theirs; we spend 0.6 minutes a day in theaters and museums, less than a half of the 1.4 minutes they spend.

­Architecture Magazine­ December, 1999

The average American spends only 72 minutes outdoors each day.

The average American household watches 50 hours, 44 minutes of TV every week.

Amount of time the average American will spend watching TV commercials over a lifetime: 1 year

Ratio of humans to TVs: 4 to 1

Americans typically spend 6 hours per week shopping and 40 minutes playing with kids.

Percentage of employed Americans who feel the need to simplify their lives and create more time for family:    81

Nancy Gaubatz, “A Lesson for Efficient Living,” TheChristian Science Monitor, March 26, 2003.  Pages 1-2

I was working for the most efficient man on earth.

He as a motivational speaker, and vice president of a large company.  I was his assistant, which meant that when he needed to be efficient, I had to take up the slack.  As it was, I would never have been able to practice the efficient way of living that he preached.  I thought he did, and my work seemed really important.  I woke from that illusion the day that he decided to get married—in the office.

He had been dating a woman for a year.  She was kind and young, with large eyes and long legs.  The thing that impressed him most about her, though, was that she was so impressed with him.  She didn’t seem to mind making dates to see him over the phone with me.  I had never seen her before the day she was to be married.  She looked smart in her white pantsuit and white pumps.  A real business beauty.

“Nancy, can you come here a moment please?” my boss called from his office.  When I went in, he continued.  “We don’t have much time.  I have an 11:30 with Mr. Stevens.  So sally and I are getting married in the conference room.  Would you care to be her maid of honor?”

“Uh, uh, well I, uh, suppose I could uh.”

“Great.  Conference room across from Miller’s desk in two minutes.  I’m going to use the restroom now.”

As shocked and unnerved as I was by this proposal, I complied.  I walked down the hall to the conference room.  Phil, the head of accounting, was standing by someone I assumed was the judge performing the ceremony.

“I’m the best man.  We’d just finished a meeting together and he asked me to be the best man and I thought, well, heck, why not!”

I smiled and stood quietly behind the bride to be.  She smiled back at me.

“Isn’t this exciting?  Hi, I’m Sally.  Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.  I know you must be busy.”  She beamed.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,

And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.

And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment

       which scattered the stars into space.

Cummings, E.E.  Complete Poems, 1904 - 1962. United States of America:  1991.   ISBN 0871401525, Page 1034

9

there are so many tictoc

clocks everywhere telling people

what toctic time it is for

tictic instance five toc minutes toc past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does

not get out of order nor do

its hands a little jerking move

over numbers slowly

we do not wind it up it has no weights

springs wheels inside of

its slender self no indeed dear

nothing of the kind.

(So, when kiss Spring comes

we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss

lips because tic clocks toc don’t make

a toctic difference

to kisskiss you and to

kiss me)

Davies, Robertson.  A Voice From the Attic.  New York: 1990.  ISBN 0140120815, Page 9

What is time?  Let the philosophers and the physicists say what they will, time for most of us is the fleeting instant we call Now.  Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives.

Yet how many people there are who read as though some prize awaited them when they turned the last page! They do not wish to read a book; they want to have read it—no matter how.  The prize they seek is to have done with the book in hand.  And so, as they read, they are always straining forward toward the goal of completion.  Is it  astonishing that they experience so little on the way, and that while they may be “great readers” quantitatively they are wretchedly poor readers qualitatively, and that they reveal by the poverty of their minds how ill-read they truly are?

From The Importance of Loafing by Lin Yutang, 1938

If men fail to enjoy this earthly existence we have, it is because they do not love life sufficiently and allow it to be turned into a humdrum routine existence.... Our quarrel with efficiency is not that it gets things done, but that it is a thief of time when it leaves us no leisure sure to enjoy ourselves and that it frays our nerves in trying to get things done perfectly.  An American editor worries his hair gray to see that no typographical mistakes appear on the pages of his magazine.  The Chinese editor is wiser than that.  He wants to leave his readers the supreme satisfaction of discovering a few typographical mistakes for themselves. More than that, a Chinese magazine can begin printing serial fiction and forget about it half-way.  In America it might bring the roof down on the editors, but in China it doesn’t matter, simply because it doesn’t matter.  American engineers in building bridges calculate so finely and exactly as to make the two ends come together within one-tenth of an inch.  But when two Chinese begin to dig a tunnel from both sides of a mountain, both come out on the other side.  The Chinese’s firm conviction is that it doesn’t matter so long as a tunnel is dug through, and if we have two instead of one, why, we have a double track to boot.  Provided you are not in a hurry, two tunnels are as good as one, dug somehow, finished somehow and if the train can get through somehow.  And the Chinese are extremely punctual, provided you give them plenty of time to do a thing.  They always finish a thing on schedule, provided the schedule is long enough.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, excerpted from Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings edited by Stephen W. Hines.  Published by C. K. Hall and Company.

A few days ago, with several others, I attended the meeting of a woman’s club in a neighboring town.  We went in a motor car, taking less than an hour for the trip on which we used to spend three hours before the days of motor cars; but we did not arrive at the time appointed nor were we the latest comers by any means. Nearly everyone was I late, and all seemed in a hurry. We hurried through the proceedings; we hurried in our friendly exchanges of  conversation; we hurried away; and we hurried all the way home where we arrived late as usual.

What became of the time the motor car saved us?   Why was everyone late and in a hurry? I used to drive leisurely over to this town with a team, spend a pleasant afternoon, and reach home not much later than I did this time, and all with a sense of there being time enough, instead of a feeling of rush and hurry. We have so many machines and so many helps, in one way and another, to save time; and yet I wonder what we do with the time we save. Nobody seems to have any!

Neighbors and friends go less often to spend the day. Instead, they say, “We have been planning for so long to come and see you, but we haven’t had time,” and the answer will be: “Everyone makes the same complaint. People don’t go visiting like they used to. There seems to be no time for anything.” I have heard this conversation, with only slight variations, so many times that I should feel perfectly safe to wager that I should hear it anytime the subject might be started. We must have all the time there is, the same as always. We should have more, considering the timesaving, modern conveniences.  That becomes of the time we save?

Thomas Moore. The Care of the Soul—A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life New York: Harper Collins, 1992, Page 274

Why does our culture seem so angry at things?  Why do we take out our frustrations upon the very things that could potentially make our world into a satisfying and comforting home?  One answer may be that when we are cut off from soul and its sensitivity to great spans of time and even timeless elements, we long painfully for an ideal future and for immortality.  Old buildings remind us of a past we were not a part of.  If we are identified with the ego, then those past times are an affront to our desire for immortality. 

Henry Ford, a pioneer in efficient manufacturing, is supposed to have said that history is bunk.  If our life efforts are directed toward making a new world, toward growth and constant improvement, then the past will be the enemy, a reminder of death.

R. Alec Mackenzie, The Time Trap, New York, 1972

When long-range objectives become obscured it is easy to replace them with much shorter-range and even hopelessly misplaced goals, such as efficiency.  This is not to argue against being efficient in the right things at the right time.  But efficiency, as an end in itself, is futile.

Rechtschaffen, Stephan, Timeshifting, New York:  1996.  ISBN 0385478496, Pages 54 and 139

There is such a significant difference in our lives when we are able to slow down, expand the moment, and become fully present for life around us.  Then a walk in the woods, a game with our children, or a symphony by Beethoven can bring us to the same peak as parachuting.  Smelling a flower, spending time in meditation, even doing household chores or eating a meal can be intensely pleasurable.  Since most of our lives are not lived with the extensity of an Indy 500, think how much more rewarding it is to get most of our highs from everyday events....

Today, time is a measure both of productivity and efficiency.  The more we work, we believe, the more we produce; the more we “use our time well,” the better our work will be. We are paid by the hour according to how much we can produce.  Our recognition in money or fame is based on our productivity measured against time.

Kundera, Milan,  Slowness New York:  1995 ISBN 0060173696, Pages 2 and 3

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.  As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. 

This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine:  from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.  A curious alliance:  the cold impersonality of technology with the flames of ecstasy.

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?  There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.”  A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored:  he is happy.  In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing:  a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.

Rajesh Shah,  “In Praise Of Inefficiency And Disorganization” Haas Week Home, 1996: XXIII:4 Page 1

But something about spending some time rambling, beyond smelling the roses, although they do smell nice, appeals to me.  You know, waiting for things to hit you, waiting for events to happen.  Giving up control, slowing down, doing only one thing at a time—these all seem like alien ideas at Haas (please don’t let any recruiter see this piece).  Since I cannot think of all the possibilities, I don’t mind letting things happen to me, guide me, inform me. 

More often than not, nice things have happened. Serendipity has a welcome in my life and I am glad I make room for it.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees,

                “I have discovered that all human evil stems from one fact alone:  Man’s inability to sit still.”

Margaret Mead, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, New York, 1955, Page 241

When she worked at home, she followed her own rhythm, and ended an operation when she felt—by the resistance against the pounding mallet or the feel between her fingers—that the process was complete.  In the factory she is asked to adjust her rhythm to that of the rhythm prescribed by the factory; to do things according to externally set time limits.

Robert M. Pirsig, Lila. New York:  November, 1991  ISBN 0553077376, Page 7

Phaedrus had met Rigel and Capella when rain from a September hurricane caused floods to break through canal walls and submerge buoys and jam locks with debris so that the entire canal had to be closed for two weeks.  Boats heading south from the Great Lakes were tied up and their crewmen had nothing to do. 

Suddenly a space was created in everyone’s lives.  An unexpected gap of time had opened up.  The reaction of everyone at first was frustration.  To sit around and do nothing, that was just terrible.  The yachtsmen had been busy about their own private cruises not really wanting very much to speak to any one else, but now they had nothing better to do than sit around on their boats and talk to each other day after day.  Not trivially.  In depth.  Soon everyone was visiting somebody on somebody else’s boat.  Parties broke out everywhere, simultaneously, all night long.  Townspeople took an interest in the jam-up of boats, and some of them became acquainted with the sailors.  Not trivially.  In depth.  And more parties broke out.

W.H. Davies, Leisure

What is this life, if, full of care,

We have no lime to stand and stare, No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows --

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Bell, Daniel.  The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.  A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: 1973.  ISBN 465012817, Pages 474-5

Since “free time” becomes more and more precious, the consumer will tend to buy those items that require relatively little of his non-work time and relatively more of his income from work.  He will buy items that he can use and then throw away.  He will “contract out” various services or maintenances (as he now sends clothes to the dry cleaners).  And to do this he may have to work longer in order to acquire the kinds of goods and services that give him a big yield on his non-work time.  But the cost may be too high and he has to begin to reckon his trade-offs.  He must calculate relative prices and yields from different allocations of time and money.  He may find that because of high maintenance cost he will do his own laundry or dry cleaning in a self-service store, thus spending part of his time to save money.  Or he may want to spend money to save time.

In balancing these considerations he begins to plot (without knowing that he is doing technical economics) an indifference curve of differential scales of substitution (of time and money) and the marginal utility of each unit of satisfaction in the different sectors of his expenditures.  Low yields have to be transferred to high yields until, at the end, his resources have been so efficiently distributed as to give him an equal yield in all sectors of use. 

Economic abundance thus reintroduces utility by the back door of time.  Man, in his leisure time, has become homo economicus....

The end of scarcity, it was believed—the leap from the kingdom of necessity would be the freeing of time from the inexorable rhythm of economic life.  In the end, all time has become an economic calculus.  As Auden put it, “Time will say only, I told you so.”

Carlson, Richard., and Joseph Bailey.  Slowing Down to the Speed of Life:  How to Create a More Peaceful, Simpler Life from the Inside Out. New York:  1997.   ISBN 0062514539, Page xxi

Instead of accomplishing the same goals more quickly, we set higher goals, constantly pushing ourselves to do more and do it faster, thus getting further and further behind.  Where is all the time that we saved?  When do we get it back?  When do we get to enjoy life?  Isn’t that allegedly why we are doing all these things?

Briskin, Alan, The Stirring Of Soul In The Workplace, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1996: ISBN 0787902810, Page 100

The implications of the standardization of time dawned slowly on the American people.  Two years after the railroads thus imposed standard time zones on the nation, time clocks appeared in American factories.  Timeliness took on a new meaning, a precision not formerly associated with work.  The boss not only owned your time, but now he measured it in precise units and equated it with profit.  A Midwestern newspaper acknowledged this trend by noting:  The sun is no longer boss of the job.  People --- must eat, sleep, and work as well as travel by railroad time” (Rosenzweig, Brier, and Brown, 1993, p. 74).  Reason demanded that workers subordinate their own experience of natural rhythms to the logic of efficiency.

Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information, Random House, Inc., New York: 1992 ISBN 0394576012, Page 144

Blessed with light bulbs and dams, haven’t we simply figured out a new, somewhat more efficient way to order our lives?  We don’t farm anymore, so why should we care much about the seasons or the length of the day?  Because, I think, living in linear time means living with a different, and in many ways poorer, set of assumptions than living in cyclical time.  On the mountain, feeling fall about to follow summer, I have a strong sense of what fall will be like—fall, not fall of 1991.  The precise year, or the decade, matters little; it is a repeating pattern, and I know what it means for my life—that it’s time to gather vegetables and can them, that it’s time to put wood up for the winter.  I know this fall won’t be precisely the same as any other—a large part of rural conversation involves meticulous comparison of this year’s snow or heat with the snow or heat of every other year.  But I know they’ll be enough alike, unless there is a storm so huge it changes the landscape.  And even then how quickly the cycle reasserts itself.

John D. Barrow, Cosmology -- The Origin Of The Universe, New York:  1994  ISBN 0465053548, Page 94

This democratic treatment of observers in Einstein’s general theory of relativity means that there is no preferred way of telling time in the universe.  Nobody ever measures some absolute phenomenon called “time”; what one measures is the rate of some physical change in the universe.  It could be the fall of sand in an egg-timer, the movement of the hands on a clock face, or the dripping of a tap.  There are countless changing phenomena that could be used to define the passage of time.  For instance, on a cosmic scale, observers around the universe could use the falling temperature of the background radiation to tell time.  No one particular measure of change seems to be more fundamental than any other.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, Continuum Pub Group; ISBN: 0826412602 ; Page 109

The machine which can produce the same quantity in half the time is twice as good as the older and slower one.  Of course, there are important economic reasons for this.  But, as in so many other aspects, human values have become determined by economic values.  What is good for machines must be good for man -- so goes the logic.  Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.

Wim Zweers and Jan J. Boersema, Ecology, Technology and Culture : Essays in Environmental Philosophy Great Britain: Paul & Co Pub Consortium, 1994; ISBN: 1874267111, Page 199

Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin, because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process [of the economy], whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold.

Percival White  The Atlantic Monthly, The July Almanac, 1995 Page 14

“Seventy five years ago, writing in the July, 1920, issue of The Atlantic Monthly”

Efficiency is fondly regarded in the American mind as the greatest contribution of this age to civilization.  It is deemed an agency for good, a thing one cannot have too much of....  Efficiency is a lightning calculator, by which you may convert time into anything you like, and read the answer in percentages, to the third decimal place.  By its means, for example, you may change minutes into dollars, which is, after all, the thing most of us are trying to do.... 

Yet there is danger in these glib conversions.  Money is a tangible thing.  The more you save, the more you have.  But time is far more subtle stuff.  Saving it does not imply having it.  As soon as a man seriously starts saving time,  make up your mind that he will no longer have a moment to spare.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.  New York:  1932, Page 90

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Aesop’s Fables, The Hare And The Tortoise

The Tortoise moved with a slow but steady pace; the Hare, trusting his own  swiftness, cared little about the race and, lying down by the road fell fast asleep.  The Tortoise plodded on, but the Hare overslept and awoke to find the Tortoise crossing the finish line.  Slow and steady wins the race.

From William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Ashleigh Brilliant

Maybe I’m lucky to be going so slowly because I may be going in the wrong direction.

Evelyn Waugh

Most of the world’s troubles seem to come from people who are too busy.  If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we would all be.

Feldman, Lee.  “Silent Movies.”  Musician February 1998, Page 98

Sometimes I walk slowly down crowded streets and avenues.  I mean really slowly; people pass by like I’m a ghost.  After a few minutes, I feel like I’m living out of time.  The movie playing in my head—how I’m going to be so famous that everyone who dislikes me will be permanently embarrassed (for example) -- begins to fade.  I start to feel good.  I’m now walking slowly enough so that I can see minute variations in the mortar between bricks.  After twenty feet (twenty seconds) or so, I might look straight ahead.  An abandoned plastic bag is spinning in an interesting pattern, like a human trying to fly. 

I cross the street and an old lady not much higher than her walker passes me on the left.  The determination it takes just to live a life becomes clear for a moment.

Martha Vanceburg and Sylvia Silverman, Devotional Calendars,  Family Feelings, New York:  1989  ISBN 05533470505, Page 23, January 23

Efficiency eases work, but it can curtail or eliminate other values in life.  Unquestionably, airplanes are faster than bicycles; but travel by bicycle allows you to smell wildflowers along the roadside; to feel the movement of air, the sun, and the rain; to speak with people along the way; to stop for refreshment.

A small child going for a walk is interested in everything: dead leaves, old cigarette butts, cellophane wrappers.  As we grow up, we learn to filter out a lot of what we see, classifying much of it as waste.  Only some of it merits our interest; but if we come to value efficiency and speed above all else, we will filter out too much.  We’ll deprive  ourselves of the human responses that nourish our spirits. Warm human relationships are more valuable than efficient ones.  Speed can’t breach my solitude; love can.

By O.L. Crain – 1957

Slow me down, Lord!

Ease the Pounding of my heart

By the quieting of my mind.

Steady my hurried pace

With a vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me,

Amidst the confusion of my day,

The calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tensions of my nerves

With the soothing music of singing streams

That live in my memory.

Help me to know

The magical restoring power of sleep

Teach me the art

Of taking minute vacations of slowing down

to look at a flower;

to chat with an old friend or make a new one;

to pat a stray dog;

to watch a spider build a web;

to smile at a child;

or read a few lines from a good book.

Remind me each day

That the race is not always to the swift;

That there is more to life than increasing its speed.

Let me look upward

Into the branches of the towering oak

And know that it grew great and strong

Because it grew slowly and well.

Slow me down, Lord,

And inspire me to send my roots deep

Into the soil of life’s enduring values,

That I may grow toward the stars

Of my greater destiny.

Edwards, Owen.  “Remembrance of Things Fast.” Forbes ASAP December 2, 1996, Page 116

Some years ago, I managed to spend a few hours a week rowing a single shell.   Then, enabled by the tools of the information age to cram more productivity into fewer hours, I increased my working hours (to make more money) and decided that a rowing machine would let me burn calories without the inconvenience of straying too far from my computer.  The result was efficient but, in the end, a bland simulation.  Then, responding to a sense that all was not entirely well, I joined a rowing club with a boat house on a lake not far from my house.  Now I am on the water most mornings around seven, using a technology that has changed little since Thomas Eakins was painting scullers on the Schuylkill River a century ago.  I don’t burn any more calories than I do on my home machine, but I watch the gulls and pelicans land and take off, I deal with the wind and the mist, I feel how the long, narrow shell glides over the water when my strokes are good, and, if I make a clumsy mistake, there’s always the chance I’ll encounter the shocking reality of cold water.

Today, we hear politicians and sociologists warn of the coming division between digital haves and have-nots.  I suspect this is simply another of the historic separations that inevitably follow close behind technological change—after all, half the world’s population still doesn’t have toilets, yet life goes on.  The coming division that will really matter to many of us will be between those who have found a way to balance the yin of digital Zen and the yang of substantial reality, and those who haven’t.  The former will understand the power of the digital advantage, and also the consequences of forgetfulness and disassociation that wait in ambush for those possessed by speed.  The latter will grow ever more enamored of disengagement—or resistant to reality with all its messiness and unpredictability—and will become a new kind of cloistered, misanthropic monk, socially maladroit, politically unconcerned.  Digital adepts increasingly devoid of analog wisdom.  People without memories.

Easwaran, Eknath.  Take Your Time:  Finding Balance in a Hurried World.  New York: 1994.  ISBN 0786862211, Page 23

A slower life is not an ineffective life; it is not an unartistic life; it is not a boring life.  Just the opposite.  It is much more effective, more artistic, much richer than a life lived as a race against the clock.  It gives you time to pause, to think, to reflect, to decide, to weigh pros and cons.  It gives you time for relationships.

Petrini, Carlo. Issue no. 1, April-June 1996 The International Herald of Tastes

Granted, we all know that speed has been the obsession of the modern world for the past hundred years, that it dominates every aspect of social organization and consequently also regulates our meals. Moreover, speed now multiplies our leisure time and empty hours as well, extending that part of the week devoted to relaxation, recreation and pleasure. It is a contradiction that still requires a solution. If only we could look around like snails, warily coming out of our shells, saving energy and drawing more from our contact with the earth and its fruits. Surely this would be a new way of life...

Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey.  Time For Life:  The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. U.S.A:  1997, ISBN 0271016523

“Efficiency” has never been a friend of leisure, since “leisure” historically has meant behavior undertaken without reference to time.  In the ancient Greek notion of leisure, contemplation was an ideal.  Later, “leisure” was thought of as “pastimes,” but one cannot “pass” the time if efficiency is the primary goal.  One can only “spend,” “invest,” and “save” it, or one will surely “lose” it.  While leisure activity has traditionally been slow-paced and luxuriating in time, the cult of efficiency has reshaped the free time of Americans in fundamental ways.  In this postmodern era, all human actions are becoming means to some other end—that is, are instrumental behaviors.  We walk for fitness, play golf for contacts, and read to improve one’s mind.  Passing the time in activities that are pleasurable in and of themselves is almost a foreign notion.  Efficiency rules both at work and at leisure.

Donald B. Kraybill and Marc A. Olshan,  The Amish Struggle With Modernity, Philadelphia:  1994, Page 32

Rationalization separates ends from means in the human mind.  Abstract thought allows individuals to separate themselves from their immediate environment at least mentally—if not physically.  Large corporate structures remove the throttles of power from the immediate control of local people.  In contrast to traditional peoples, moderns are often “freed” from the constraints of caste, neighborhood, and family.  Discontinuity, mobility, and individuation loosen social ties, making it easier to sever relationships when convenient—divorce being the most obvious example....

To be sure, the electronic age, with instantaneous communication and high-speed travel, has multiplied the number of possible connections an individual might have with others around the globe.  But, for the most part,  modernization separates and partitions whole systems—psychological, social, and organizational ones—into smaller parts in the name of efficiency and productivity.  The systemic ties that bind modern systems together are for the most part abstract, complicated, and separated from the individual’s immediate context.  The fragmentation of modern life is sometimes experienced on the personal level as alienation—when meaningful ties to purpose, friends, work, and neighborhood are ruptured.

Putnam, Robert.  Bowling Alone:  America’s Declining Social Capital. Pages 5 and 7

More Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so.  Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent....  The proportion of Americans who socialize with their neighbors more than once a year has slowly but steadily declined over the last two decades, from 72 percent in 1974 to 61 percent in 1993.... 

Americans are also less trusting.  The proportion of Americans saying that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did.

Lightman, Alan.  ­Dance For Two.­  New York:  1996.  ISBN 0679758771,  Pages 89-90

In the twentieth century the concept of progress changed, becoming increasingly tied to technology and large dehumanized technological systems.  By the time of the 1939 World's Fair, in New York, one would read the following in the promotional literature of the futuristic General Motors exhibit:  "Since the beginning of civilization, transportation and communication have been keys to Man's progress, his prosperity, his happiness."  In one fell swoop, technology, progress, and happiness had become bound in a compelling dream of the future.

Today, at the end of the twentieth century, a crucial question before us is whether developments in technology inevitably improve the quality of life.  And if not, we must ask how our society can employ some selectivity and restraint, given the enormous capitalistic forces at work.   That is a terribly difficult problem for several reasons, not the least of which is the subjective nature of progress and quality of life.  Is progress greater human happiness? Greater comfort?  Greater speed in personal transportation and communication?  The reduction of human suffering? Longer life span?  Even with a definition of progress, its measurements and technological requirements are not straightforward.  If progress is human happiness, has anyone shown that twentieth-century people are happier than nineteenth-century people?  If progress is comfort, how do we weigh the short-term comfort of air conditioning against the long-term  comfort of a pollution-free environment?  If progress is longer life span, can we ever discontinue life support for a dying patient in pain?

Only a fool would claim that new technology rarely improves the quality of life.  The electric light has expanded innumerable human activities, from reading to nighttime athletic events.  Advances in medicine -- particularly the germ theory of disease, public-health programs, and the development of good antiseptics -- have obviously reduced physical suffering and substantially extended the healthy human life span.

But one can also argue that advances in technology do not always improve life.  I will skip over such obvious environmental problems as global warming, ozone depletion, and nuclear-waste disposal, and consider something more subtle:  high-speed communications.  We are already seeing people at restaurants talking into cellular phones as they dine.  Others take modems on vacations, so they can stay in touch with their offices at all times.  Or consider E-mail, the example I began with.  E-mail has undeniable benefits.   It is faster than regular mail and cheaper and less obtrusive than the telephone.  It can promote conversations among far-flung communities of people, and it can encourage otherwise reticent talkers to speak up, via computer terminals.  But E-mail, in my view, also contributes to the haste, the thoughtlessness, and the artificial urgency that increasingly characterize our world.

Russell, Cheryl.  The Master Trend How the Baby Boom Generation Is Remaking America  New York: Perseus  1993. ISBN 0306445077, Page 57

The culture of the personalized economy is already pervasive:  public faxes, automatic teller machines, cellular phone companies, video outlets, computer stores, fast-food restaurants, and twenty-four-hour supermarkets line the highways of urban and suburban America.  The contrast between the culture of free agents and the communal culture of the 1950s could not be greater: microwaves versus ovens; fast-food restaurants versus family dinners; fax machines or telephones versus letters; televisions versus newspaper; computer networks versus libraries; videos versus books; credit cards versus saving accounts; twenty-four-hour shopping versus banker’s hours.  While many older Americans still cling to the communal culture of mid-century, most of those under 50 --particularly Americans who must work for a living—belong to the culture of free agents, if not out of choice then out of necessity.

The culture of free agents is fast and personal.  Speed is the competitive edge in the personalized economy, giving rise to one-hour film processing, walk-in medical clinics, 30-minute pizza delivery, and one-minute managers.  The ultimate consequence of the fast-paced culture of free agents is “real time” products and services.  These are products and services delivered at the instant someone demands them.  The telephone, an instrument of “real time” communication, is more popular than the mail.  The fax is displacing overnight delivery.  Television itself offers an increasing amount of real-time information through twenty-four-hour news networks and live reporting.

Verespej, Mike.  “Be Your Own Force.”  ­Internet World­  June 21, 1999. Page 22

A former IBM Corp. manager with an M.B.A. from Columbia University, Jewell is concerned that the advances in information technology have created a breed of managers who have lost the art of human interaction and who immerse themselves in information rather than focusing on the value that that information can provide to customers.

Who among us, he asks, is not guilty of sending someone a voice mail or electronic message—rather than getting up to talk to a person two offices away—because of the desire to avoid a  possible conflict?

“A lot of managers use electronic mail and voice mail as a crutch,” says Jewell, president and founder of Jewell Consulting Group, Denver.  “We have made them a useful avoidance tool on the pretense that we are [avoiding] ‘less efficient’ human interaction.”

Thomas, Susan Gregory “Online party planning misses the human touch.”   U.S. News & World Report, 03/27/2000, Vol. 128 Issue 12, Page 65

Silicon Valley's E-everything economy has rewritten many a social custom in the name of efficiency. In much of the country, it is now  perfectly acceptable to interrupt a conversation to answer a page, or to hold a cell phone business meeting while at a restaurant table. As an avid user of tech gear, I have happily acculturated to such changes in the workplace. But now that they're infringing on my personal life, efficiency and rudeness are beginning to look a lot alike.

Morris, William.  News From Nowhere and Other Writings. London:  1888, Pages 304, 306  -- Lecture Given to the Hampstead Liberal Club, 1884.

Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use. They are called ‘labour-saving’ machines—a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect.  What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number of the ‘reserve army of labour’—that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their masters).  All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the employers of labour, or force them to expend those profits in bitter commercial war with each other.  In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimizing the amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so reduced as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would ‘pay’ the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community….

What the cost may be, who can tell?  Will it be possible to win peace peaceably?  Alas, how can it be?  We are so hemmed in by wrong and folly, that in one way or other we must always be fighting against them:  our own lives may see no end to the struggle, perhaps no obvious hope of the end.  It may be that the best we can hope to see is that struggle getting sharper and bitterer day by day, until it breaks out openly at last into the slaughter of men by actual warfare instead of by the slower and crueller methods of ‘peaceful’ commerce. 

If we live to see that, we shall live to see much; for it will mean the rich classes grown conscious of their own wrong and robbery, and consciously defending them by open violence; and then the end will be drawing near. But in any case, and whatever the nature of our strife for peace may be, if we only aim at it steadily and with a singleness of heart, and ever keep it in view, a reflection from that peace of the future will illumine the turmoil and trouble of our lives, whether the trouble be seemingly petty, or obviously tragic; and we shall, in our hopes at least, live the lives of men: nor can the present times give us any reward greater than that.

Womack, James P.  Lean Thinking.  New York:  1996 ISBN 0684810352, Page 50

What happens when you go to your doctor?  Usually, you make an appointment some days ahead, then arrive at the appointed time and sit in a waiting room.  When the doctor sees you—usually behind schedule—she or he makes a judgment about what your problem is likely to be.  You are then routed to the appropriate specialist, quite possibly on another day, certainly after sitting in another waiting room.  Your specialist will need to order tests using large, dedicated laboratory equipment, requiring another wait and then another visit to review the results.  Then, if the nature of the problem is clear, it’s time for the appropriate treatment, perhaps involving a trip to the pharmacy (and another line), perhaps a trip back to the specialist for a complex procedure (complete with wait).  If you are unlucky and require hospital treatment, you enter a whole new world of specialized functions, disconnected processes, and waiting.

If you take a moment to reflect on your experience, you discover that the amount of time actually spent on your treatment was a tiny fraction of the time you spent going through the “process.” Mostly you were sitting and waiting (“patient” is clearly the right word), or moving about to the next step in the diagnosis and treatment.  You put up with this because you’ve been told that all this stopping and starting and being handed off to strangers is the price of “efficiency” in receiving the highest-quality care.

T. Kimber and K. Moore, “Victims of Comfort” From Keb’Mo’, 1994, Linicker Music (ASCAP)/ Keb’Mo’ Music (BMI) Epic Division of Sony Music Entertainment

And everyone likes a party, but no one wants to clean.

But I’d like to see a change, somehow,

But I’m a little busy right now...

Just a little busy right now.

I’m a victim of comfort. I got no one else to blame.

I am just a victim of comfort... crying shame.

Jay Walljasper, “Why It’s So Hard To Slow Down” The Speed Trap, Utne Reader March-April 1997, Page 44

Jogi Panghaal, a designer who works with community groups in India, defines the issue as not simply whether speed is good or bad, but whether the world of the future will allow a variety of speeds.  He talked at the conference about his concern that a monoculture of speed will develop in which the whole world is expected to move at the same pace.  India and other traditional societies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are already undergoing culture shock as the rule of Western efficiency bears down upon them. People who once lived according to the rhythms of the sun, the seasons, and nature are now buying alarm clocks, carrying pocket calendars, and feeling the pressure to move faster and faster.  Panghaal warned that inhabitants of the industrialized nations may feel this loss as much as the traditional peoples do because less modernized cultures provide inspiration for finding a slower, simpler way of living—including the two-week vacation in the Third World that has become a necessary ritual of replenishment for many of us.

Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Ancient Futures, California:  1991  ISBN 0871565595, Page 106

In the traditional economy, time was plentiful and limited only by the course of the seasons.  However much work there was to be done, life was lived at a human pace and everyone could afford to be patient.  By contrast, the modern economy turns time into a commodity—something that can be bought and sold— and suddenly it is quantified and divided into the tiniest fragments.  Time becomes something costly, and as people acquire new “time-saving” technologies the pace of life only gets faster.

Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, Pages 41, 98 and 149

The Personality Ethic tells me that there must be something out there—some new planner or seminar that will help me handle all these pressures in a more efficient way.  But is there a chance that efficiency is not the answer? Is getting more things done in less time going to make a difference—or will it just increase the pace at which I react to the people and circumstances that seem to control my life?  Could there be something I need to see in a deeper, more fundamental way—some paradigm within myself that affects the way I see my time, my life and my own nature?...

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.  If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.  We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind....

People have begun to realize that “efficient” scheduling and control of time are counterproductive.  The efficiency focus creates expectations that clash with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, to meet human needs, and to enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis.

“To Any One” by Witter Bynne from Rittenhouse, Jessie B. The Second Book of Modern Verse. New York:  1919

Whether the