Having Time for Children

I was reading the most recent issue of Yes! magazine (Winter 2006; www.yesmagazine.org) and was struck by an article by Jonathan Rowe ("Out of Time") in which he remarked…

"If you have ever lived in a Third World village, then you probably have experienced a strange – to us Americans – absence of time. There is a rhythm to daily life. People rise early to beat the sun. They prepare meals, wash clothes, visit, rest. All this proceeds at its own pace. In my wife’s village in the Philippines, I do not recall ever having seen a clock.

"Nor do I recall a lack of time. To the contrary, there is an abundance. The less time is measured and packaged, it seems, the more there is of it. To which a skeptic might reply, "Well of course. These people are poor. They don't have anything else to do." But that’s the point. They are poor in one sense and yet rich in another. That other sense happens to be the one that we Americans increasingly lack.

"We are obsessed with time. We assault it, seek to tame and manage it . . . . We measure our progress largely by the amount of stuff we turn out per hour of work, which we call 'productivity' (without regard to whether we really need the items produced). Yet striving to conquer time we end up having less of it and feeling miserable as a result.”

This passage reminded me of a wonderful presentation, "Having Time for Children" made by Ilse Elisabeth Plattner from Namibia at our 2001 World Forum in Athens. We reprinted this presentation in Exchange and today you can read it, if you have the time, on our web site at http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/920

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