Take Your Time

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Reject e-mail's Pavlovian ping. Train people to expect a response an hour, a day, or even a full week after they e-mail you.

When all else fails, lie. White lies are sometimes the only way to control your life. Use as needed.

Grating a radish or e-mailing someone a week late may not exactly seem revolutionary. And yet, making our nation's collective fantasy of slowing down a reality could ultimately save us. As Mark Slouka writes in Harper's Magazine (Nov. 2004), "Idleness is not just a psychological necessity. . . . It constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space . . . necessary to . . . democracy . . . by allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it."

In the wake of yet another bitterly divisive election season, we remain a nation in search of a common bond. Our last collective pause, it seems, was after 9/11. Yet, instead of taking the time and space to reclaim an inner life, we all too willingly accepted the president's advice that the most patriotic thing to do was head to the mall and buy stuff. Perhaps it's too much to hope for, but taking on the modern culture of busyness may be one way to bridge our ideological divide. Lack of free time, after all, is an everyday civic issue that affects us all. Busyness remains our national theology, but if we slow down and allow ourselves to just be, we may start to heal.

As the monk Thomas Merton said, "It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. . . . Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say."

Anjula Razdan is a senior editor of Utne.

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