Time.

I rode my bike four miles today, the whole time thinking about time and how I often seem to be racing it. I do so many little things to save time, but there always seems to be a conflict in partitioning and distributing it... then there are hours that go by when it seems that I am not using time well, which balances out those days that I am so busy and experiencing so many things that every moment seems alive with endless significance.

I assume it to be a relative thing. In other cultures that I have experienced, time is viewed much differently than my life here. When I was in the Philippines with my family, the people we met up with seemed a bit confused and almost inconvenienced by the fact that we would meet at the exact time that we said we would. "They really are American!" they would say when we would call to make sure that they were clear on our version of time, and hustle a bit faster to get there. For a good laugh, ask your nearest filipino friend on their outlook regarding time. Family parties that say 4PM on the invite really mean "Start thinking about getting ready to go a 4PM" and everyone knows that the party really starts around 6-ish.

When Christophe and Didier were in Chicago, I found that the frenchies were just as laid back in their interpretation of time. Planning to leave the house at 8AM kind of meant being really ready to go by 10:30. That is just how they rolled, and no amount of throat clearing and glazed over looks could move the process along. In the mean time, they would be drinking coffee, making grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, listening to music, talking and smoking.

Somehow we managed to get everything that they needed to get done, done. We missed a couple of beginnings to soccer games, but otherwise they would make up for their late starts with late night - most evenings we would wind up sitting down for dinner close to midnight. They insisted on having a cocktail hour and sitting in the yard for no other reason than to relax. In a filipino household, things are communal like this as well. We might be singing a song on the karaoke machine, playing piano, poking fun at our moms and grandmas or just enjoying a quiet moment of peace or conversation.

There is an opposite extreme to this end - 120 hour work weeks, meetings, deadlines. I'd like time to go a little more slowly sometimes, but in this kind of life it always needs to go faster. This is where time becomes like money, a quickly slipping away commodity that there is no subsitute for. I worked in one job that bridged an island culture with a western business model that took over the laid back effects of equatorial life. Our office made sure that shipments got delivered, emails got answered, bills got paid in time and generally made sure that the business ran smoothly. That's how things get done in this world, but I always wondered if I might be on the wrong side of that equation.