A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours. – J.B. Priestley
The following is from an editorial, “Time Out of Mind” written by Stefan Klein
Benjamin Franklin said that “time is money.” He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to “sit idle” for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” [time].
One in three Americans feels rushed all the time, according to one survey. Even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
I tried to find a photo of Jim napping - he doesn't - or in a hammock somewhere, but this is the closest I could come to a stress-free photo. Oh, P.S. This is NOT our guesthouse.
Mantra: I'm in exactly the right place; this is exactly the right thing to do; this is the exact right way to feel.
