The last couple of years I have noticed a strange shift in the quality of time. I'm not sure of the cause. Maybe it's a product of middle age (I'm 47), maybe it's because my kids are older and more independent. Maybe it's simply that I have, at least temporarily, some stability in my financial life. Maybe it's the economy--even if I wanted to work harder, the jobs aren't there. My favorite pet theory is the Mayan apocalypse.
But I can remember a time when everyone was busy, busy, busy. We all had Daytimers, elaborate daily calendars marked out in 15-minute increments, and everything needed to be scheduled, every minute tracked and recorded. In the zeitgeist was the idea that time is money, and that one should calculate how much one's hourly rate is, and then spend that sort of money on convenience and hired help to free up one's time to work more hours. Frozen dinners, restaurant food, cleaning ladies, prepackaged everything were the focus on freeing up more precious, precious time.
Now, today, the last couple years, ever since the end of October 2011, I feel like I have entered into a Long Now. My feeling of time is more like that of indigenous cultures. There are a lot of factors contributing to this feeling. Rationally, I can see them and list them. The two roots of each factor are concern for the environment and concern for my bank balance.
First, I'm taking public transportation to work. Either I take two buses and a train, which involves a lot of waiting, or I walk the bus parts of my commute, which involves a lot of walking time. A long stroll or waiting for the bus are the opposite of the go-go-go 90's.
Second, I'm embracing the slow food movement. It's cheaper, it's healthier and it's better for the environment. Sure, I use a pressure cooker to speed up cooking times, and a slow cooker so I don't have to spend hours minding my slow cooking, but still there is a lot of time spent chopping vegetables and braising. Generally the only convenience foods I buy now are canned beans, canned tomato puree, pasta, jam and bread. I belong to an organic produce co-op, so each week I work my way through a crateful of fresh produce. Chopping up a head of fresh broccoli would have seemed the height of madness twenty years ago, when I could have bought a bag of pre-chopped frozen broccoli for less money, that would even cook faster!
I got rid of my microwave. My freezer is now generally filled with homemade soup stock and homemade pasta sauce (at least when it's not 80 degrees outside and lots of cooking helps heat my place).
I work out my errands so that the laundromat is on my way, and once a week I do one big cold-water load, and bring it home and hang it on the line to dry. This also would have been a sign of insanity 20 years ago.
Occasionally I will go visit a friend in Buffalo, and I take an all-day train rather than a quick (and cheaper) direct flight.
If it's late at night when the buses run only once an hour, I will wait rather than pay for a $15 cab ride home.
I won't say my life is like a woman in the 1940's, because I think women back then were watching the clock more. But a lot of the ways I live my life is like people lived then.
The change, at least for me, has also come to my workplace. Work, more and more, at least for me, has come to mean babysitting and managing powerful programs. I remember a time when my sort of work was a lot more labor-intensive. Now it's true that the type of programming I do has been around forever, but when I was younger I also did a lot of secretarial work. Finalizing a report meant printing it out, using a binding machine, filling out the Fedex envelope, sometimes even driving it to the Fedex dropoff if we missed out deadline. Now it's just a matter of hitting Send.
I'm also trying to spend more time out in the sun every day to improve my health. I make sure to go out for a half hour around 1:00 pm with as much of my skin exposed (except for my face, I wear a sun hat), to get my free Vitamin D. More downtime to just sit and think.
I really don't know if I'm just feeling my personal circumstances or if this change in time is out in the zeitgeist. But I am curious to find out if other people my age or older have experienced something similar. It really is a sea change.