The Lebanese Lesbian: Doing time in America

Welcome to the future! Seriously, though, is it 2013? Where’s my levitating house and my robot dog? How long have I been out and proud? Every year is more of a blur that the year before; is that normal? Dang, how old am I going to be this year? I guess it’s time to keep that between me and my driver’s license – or so I’m told.

It was once explained to me that the reason time seems to accelerate with age is because each year takes up less of a percentage of your overall life. When you’re 10, a year is a tenth of your life; when you’re 40, it’s a fortieth. That makes sense. It becomes less substantial, and therefore less significant as time goes on, right? Wrong. Well, right if you let it, and wrong if you don’t.

Time stops for no man, woman, or anyone in between or outside of those gender norms – but that doesn’t mean we have to be paralyzed by the passing of it, always trying to stop it, guilty when we do nothing with it, and defined by it.

I mean, is it just me, or do you feel like Americans are as unhealthily focused on the hour and minute hands, too? It goes beyond aging, although I have recently known several people who’ve turned 30, and about half of them (mostly women) were somehow crippled by the chiming of the bells. It’s true that our culture doesn’t really embrace getting older, or support and admire our elders the way many other cultures do, but is that the root of our obsession with time, and is our obsession with it a hindrance in a slew of other ways?

There are two known cultures that don’t even have the concept of time. One of which is the small Piraha Tribe of the Amazon Rainforest. They have no words for time or numbers. There is no past tense; everything exists in the present. When it can no longer be perceived in the now, it ceases to exist. Talk about carpe diem! While I see negatives to this seemingly extreme form of living, such as no history and no knowledge of one’s ancestry, there is something to be learned. The Piraha live a relaxed lifestyle free to experience every moment for what it is and what it is worth. These people are certainly not faced with the giant digital numbers on their iPhone every five minutes.

Americans are way on the other end of the spectrum. We attach guilt to not maximizing every moment of our time. I thought that the technological revolution was supposed to free up our time. Instead of sitting down with our checkbook to pay every bill, address the envelope, and balance our finances, we have auto-bill-pay features and bank alerts. Instead of waiting in line to pay for gasoline, we have pay-at-the-pumps. Does that mean we’re using this freed-up time to relax with our families and, I don’t know, paint a picture? Not at all. We are driven to constantly do more, earn more and consume more so that we can achieve more. It’s the American way.

Of course I’m not suggesting we throw all our clocks in the trash and get to work three hours late, but perhaps if we each take the pressure off of ourselves, release the guilt of expecting so much from daily race, and calm out hurried state of mind, we can actually hop off the wheel and not have our years always feel like another dizzying flash in the pan.

American psychiatrist and acclaimed author Peter C. Whybrow wrote, “For many Americans, the ‘free moments’ that once glued a busy life together have almost disappeared.” I agree, and I think it’s time to take ownership back of these free moments. Maybe it’s time to take our control back, and turn the tables on time controlling our everyday lives. Sounds like a good resolution to me. ]