Time

When Mark and I take our sabbatical retreats, we enter the land of “no time.” It’s an interesting place to be and one we rarely get to inhabit. The days feel so long and luxurious with no errands to run, email to check, work to do, phone calls to return, etc. When we go out on an adventure (e.g., riding our bikes up the mountain to hike in the rainforest and have a delicious lunch while looking out at the ocean), we never take a watch. In fact, time doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what time we get back to our cottage; it doesn’t matter what time we eat lunch; it doesn’t matter if we make many stops on the way back, just because we feel like it. How glorious. (I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do this.)

We’ve gotten used to surprised looks from the locals when we tell them, for example, we walked the hour-long upward hike to the Botanical Garden from our cottage on Long Point, or that we took our 5-speed bikes up 1000 feet of elevation in order to hike in the rainforest and have that delicious lunch. They look at us with a mixture of “wow, that’s pretty cool,” and “you’re just plain crazy.”

I often wonder why people marvel at our island vacation habits (never driving a car—only using our feet and bikes to do everything, including all grocery and laundry runs). But then it hits me that the locals aren’t on vacation—they are at home and working their jobs. That is, they don’t inhabit the same “no-time” land we inhabit. They inhabit the usual “not-enough-time” land that we all inhabit in our daily lives. In fact, when Mark and I are in Appleton, we never bike to the grocery store or walk an hour to get somewhere. [Although, in the spirit of no-time, I’ve recently made bike trips to the Free Market for groceries. But that’s partially because I’m still on sabbatical—that is, no obligations at Lawrence—not in my “real life” yet.]

It does make me wonder why I space-fill so much. Why must I (and we as a society) cram so darn much into an hour, a day, a week? I think it’s because running-around-with-our-heads-cutoff begets more running-around-with-our-heads-cutoff. That is, our strong habits of always doing only strengthen the need to continue the doing. If this is the case, then we can use the same strategy to strengthen different habits. For example, prioritizing some non-doing time each day (whatever that means for you—meditation, yoga, prayer, sitting in nature, taking a silent walk to no where in particular) strengthens the habit of non-doing.

Maybe we can find the happy medium between “no time” and “not enough time.” I think it’s possible. What do you think?