I admit it. I have a history of starting diaries/blogs and never keeping them up. But now I’ve got something I didn’t feel I had before: time. I hope this admission isn’t going to put everyone off. I know most of you are probably reading this in between all the other jobs you need to get done, while I’m travelling around the world volunteering in beautiful sunny places. Lucky bitch, I hear you say. And yeah, I’m lucky. So while I’ve got a taste of the good life, I’ve decided to write down some of my reflections on design, culture and sustainability.
One of the first observations I’ve made while travelling was that our experience of time is what we make of it. I don’t mean this in an individualistic sense. I haven’t become some sort of time management consultant who waltzes into your office and explains how its possible to get 20% more stuff done if only you organized your life, or a total hippy who manages to reject all the societal pressures of the work ethic (although my hippy count is getting higher by the second, I now have two pairs of MC Hammer/poo pants). I mean that culturally we have very different ways of dealing with time and although it would be a challenge, we could collectively change our experience.
I wonder why people call them poo pants?
When I was researching for my PhD in the UK I met many people who felt that life was too fast paced and we didn’t have time for anything anymore, including caring for people. These feelings were part of what led them to make their homes into retro idylls. So they could come home, relax and get pleasure from making a drink from their art deco cocktail cabinet. I felt similarly, especially about work. I never had a job in the UK where I felt I had enough time to do things properly. Apparently this experience is common in the Western world. Dale Southerton[i], an academic at Manchester University, studied these feelings and compared them with people’s experience of time in the 1940s (using the Mass Observation Archive). Actually he found we have the same, or more, leisure time than we did then. The difference is that in the 1940s our time was managed by institutional events and constraints regarding domestic life, work, and consumption; we had clocking in and out, lunch breaks, restricted shopping hours and church on Sunday. We weren’t asked to manage our own time as we are today and we didn’t have the ‘presence bleed’[ii] (work impinging on the personal lives of employees, illustrated by the bed office) of a boss emailing on a Friday night and expecting a response by Monday morning. This individualization of the experience of time, as well as the blurring of time for work, time for care, and time for leisure, is why we feel so rushed.
Until now I’ve volunteered in England (Cornwall), France, Spain and Morocco and have sensed a different pace. In Cornwall the owners of the eco-retreat and organic farm we worked on had busy lives (the presence bleed of the UK affected them too), but I was given specific tasks. I learnt that there was nothing more enjoyable than having one job to do in a day. On a vineyard in France our work was punctuated with a long boozy lunch, and in Spain by the hot midday sun. In Morocco time is institutionalized by religion, by the five times daily call for prayer.
Focusing on one job, clocking in and out, and the management of our time by institutions, sounds like a factory system, and there can be nothing more alienating than that. However, I think there are positive aspects to these ideas, especially if no money is changing hands. For example, on a ‘snow day’ in London, when no one could get to work, the most amazingly creative creatures appeared in my local park. I remember marvelling at how productive, imaginative and collaborative people are if they have the luxury of time. This memory came back to me while sewing Berber tents in Morocco, the polar opposite in terms of location, but the luxury of time I experienced was similar. I had the freedom to find creative ways of fixing the tents. It made me think; we could all benefit from finding alternative means of collectively structuring our time. Long boozy lunch anyone?
Cross-stitch protection against the evil eye (and the cold wind at night).
Berber stars to patch holes
[1] Dale Southerton (2009) ‘Temporal rhythms.’ In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life.
[2] See Melissa Gregg (2011) ‘Work’s Intimacy’ for the concept of ‘presence bleed’. A great book!
that culture thing 