Comments on: So teach us to number our days… http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/ A Mormon Blog Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:03:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: JoshuaM http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74351 Sun, 06 Aug 2006 17:47:06 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74351 What were supposed to learn? Maybe depends on which mortal probation you are in.

]]> By: Zelophehad’s Daughters » Blog Archive » Trash Art, Equivocally Trashed http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74369 Sat, 05 Aug 2006 01:19:17 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74369 [...] And then there’s the problem of time. Kristine’s BCC post on the mortal significance of time captures it well: As mortals, we experience this pressure both as the daily lack of enough time to do all the things we should or want to do, and as we contemplate the span of our lives, knowing that we will not live long enough to finish the !()#$##! Ph.D., become a world-class cellist, go to medical school, and learn to play timpani and French horn passably well. [...]

]]> By: Kristine http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74368 Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:44:39 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74368 Of course they are–they’re the ones I know. I have no idea what it would feel like to be trying to balance time for subsistence farming with my poetry reading. I’m aware of my privilege, and am frequently horrified by it.

]]> By: J. Stapley http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74367 Fri, 04 Aug 2006 18:47:37 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74367 Kristine: Our modern, Western, industrialized, wealthy, Coveyized anxieties about time are trivial compared to the real pressure of fitting in survival tasks that faces people who live closer to the existential bone (which is part of why I find Covey hard to stomach in any but small doses–his concerns are so clearly those of the privileged few)

Now, I am no big fan of Covey, but it seems to me the modern, wealthy anxieties that make Coveyization nauseating are the particular anxieties that you outline in the original post:

…finish the !()#$##! Ph.D., become a world-class cellist, go to medical school, and learn to play timpani and French horn passably well.

]]> By: Kristine http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74366 Fri, 04 Aug 2006 18:37:54 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74366 Yeah, I remember when my kids were teeny, wondering how something could be so hard AND so boring!

]]> By: Rosalynde http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74365 Fri, 04 Aug 2006 02:25:25 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74365 I think that’s right, Kris, and I think it helps to explain that all-too-familiar, utterly demoralizing sense of the at-home mother—whose work is largely pre-industrial—that she has both too much and too little to do during those long 24-hour shifts.

My cousin is currently working in a children’s home in Africa, and she describes the sort of time-shock she experienced as she adjusted:

For the first few days, I kept thinking “life is so hard here.” But I began to realize how much time people spend just sitting and chatting with one another. People get up early and clean and cook—and then they take a long break—and then they clean and cook—and then they take another long break—and then they clean and cook and go to bed. It is such a strange dichotomy of intense work and long periods of resting time. It has been difficult for me to adjust to the down time—-I want to be busy or engaged all the time.

This sort of cyclical rather than linear experience of time, patterned rather than scheduled, and measured in repetitive tasks rather than checklist achievements, feels very much like domestic life with small children—or at least like my domestic life with small children.

]]> By: Kristine http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74364 Fri, 04 Aug 2006 01:56:14 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74364 Rosalynde, I thought about that. It seems to me that, while this anxiety about time takes a particular (and perhaps extreme) form in industrialized societies, pre-industrial societies would have some variant of the problem–not enough time in good weather to hunt or cultivate enough food to last through the winter, not enough time to both perform the labor necessary for survival and create art or hang out and talk philosophy, etc. Our modern, Western, industrialized, wealthy, Coveyized anxieties about time are trivial compared to the real pressure of fitting in survival tasks that faces people who live closer to the existential bone (which is part of why I find Covey hard to stomach in any but small doses–his concerns are so clearly those of the privileged few).

]]> By: Ziff http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74350 Thu, 03 Aug 2006 21:57:10 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74350 What an interesting question! I wonder if, as you alluded to, the value of the limits of time is that they apply to everyone. Limited amounts of other resources, like money, might apply to some or most of us, but time limits us all. And its limiting forces us to make choices and to decide what’s really important.

But I agree with Jack that time management can become an unhealthy obsession.

]]> By: Jack http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74363 Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:46:51 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74363 Sadly, though, Rosalynde, the “Franklin-Covey” culture has taken those doctrinal tenets to a ridiculous extreme.

]]> By: Rosalynde http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/02/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74362 Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:20:08 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/08/so-teach-us-to-number-our-days/#comment-74362 Which isn’t, of course, to say that it’s not a very interesting and very pertinent question. The culture-formative Deseret period was right smack in the middle of industrialization, reflected in hymns like “Improve the Shining Moments.” Also doctrinal tenets like “this life is a probationary period” speak to this question.

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