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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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