Themes
— Time
& Community
Time marches
on. Or does it? Or should it?
We were struck
by the importance of the theme, Time and Community, while presenting
an overview of the Philia Dialogue to an audience from diverse
backgrounds. In the midst of the presentation and right out of the
blue, a mom spoke up and suggested, no asserted, that, what we had
just said made no sense to her unless we considered the issue of
time. Something it turns out we had been considering but had not
been talking about.
Her son, it
turns out, had enabled her to gain a new appreciation for that
elusive commodity, time.
We know it is
elusive, but is it a ‘commodity’?
We are no
longer sure.
And that is
the purpose of this section of our site.
The world is
changing. No longer is it a case of the big eating the small. It is
becoming the fast eating the slow. And where does that leave those
of us who don’t/won’t/can’t travel at the new expected pace of
life? Where does it leave our communities, our families, ourselves?
We are
convinced the speed of our lives represents a threat to ‘the force
of caring that binds our communities together.’ In other words,
time, as it manifests in most of our lives, undermines PHILIA.
We think that
mom was right.
So let us slip
into the mystery of time in honour of her perceptive reaction.
Not so fast!
Aside from the
material in this section we invite you to visit some of the people
who have inspired us to think more deeply about this theme.
One group is
The Long Now Foundation. You can reach them at:
www.longnow.org
The Long Now
Foundation
PO Box 29462
The Presidio
San Francisco, California 94129
(415) 561-6582
(415) 561-6297 (fax)
Similarly we
are inspired by the operations of the Italian initiated Slow Food
Movement which seeks to liberate us from that ‘insidious virus’
speed.
Click here to
read the Slow Food Manifesto.
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