This is a follow-up to my previous post about normalcy, Incarceration Makes Me Crabby.
My most scarce commodity, by far, is time. Given my goals, resources, and lifestyle, I’m neither cash-limited nor opportunity-limited nor knowledge-limited. I’m time-limited. There just isn’t enough time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do. And so I maximize efficiency, trying to make every minute count. Call it temporal frugality, if you will.
I really, really hate wasting time. If I’ve got a ten minute wait before my ride home is leaving, I’ll find something productive to do. (“Productive” can be defined fairly broadly; poking about the web counts, if I’m informing myself about something I’d like to know more about.) I arrive 30 seconds to three minutes late for almost every meeting and appointment, since I aim to arrive exactly on time and I usually overlook some speed bump or another; arriving early would mean (gasp) waiting. And even my recreational outings and vacations are planned and executed with brutal efficiency, for optimal satisfaction per unit time.
I may be a little more hyper this way than most of my associates — okay, significantly more hyper — but in my social context, a concern with temporal frugality seems rather normal. Most of my friends and colleagues are similarly time-limited. Even the retired ones are busy with all kinds of travels and entertainments and worthy projects. Heck, I’ve seen people get busier when they retire.
So when I travel about southern Africa, as I am this semester, I am truly nonplussed by the multitude of people I see waiting. Just waiting. Sitting by the road, or under a tree, or on the step of a shop. Some are waiting for a bus. Some are waiting for a friend. Some are waiting for a random passer-by to stop and buy a mango. Some, such as security guards, are getting paid to just be there. And some, as far as I can determine, are just killing time. (Ouch.) I’m pretty sure that many of these waiters are in it for the long haul… hours, probably.
It would absolutely rend me to wait like that. I’d probably need trauma counseling. So how do people here stand a life so full of waiting, of doing nothing? As I suggested in my last post: for them, it’s just normal.
And I wonder what my pace of life would look like to them. Equally intolerable, perhaps?
