Recapturing Time

MUCH OF WHAT WE HAVE BUILT OVER THE decades has proved to be a waste.  Think of the dilapidated structures, hollowed-out cores, and worn-out streets.  Worse still is the human fallout: poverty, hunger, homelessness, chronically unemployed, and the loss of young talent that opted to ply their abilities elsewhere.All this befell us in our rush to what seemed to be individual prosperity.  While all the above was transpiring, we were purchasing bigger homes, more cars, and the amenities of wealth.  We didn’t realize there was a great disconnect going on, that our own affluence might be coming at the price of our communities and our troubled fellow citizens.And now we all stand together asking, “What happened?  With so much money floating around the world, how did we get mired as cities in a kind of economic backwater?”These are good questions that a lot of terrific communities are beginning to ask themselves as they seek to get their game back.  London, Ontario is still basking in the afterglow of its X-Conference in which some enlightened and passionate leaders reminded us what we’d have to do to cope with what many feel is inevitable decline.Running through it all is the sense that time got away on us.  While we were busy, occupied, industrious, and even distracted, we were permitting our cities to get built up with lots of “junk” that satisfied us in the moment but which undercut the very sinews of who we were.  The speakers at X were eloquent in reminding us that for every strip mall we endured thousands of potholes; for every distant subdivision we lost our sense of togetherness; and for all of our well-equipped residences we ended up with abiding homelessness.  We acted as though available time was the vehicle for our individual pursuits and forgot that it often requires years to build and maintain a solid community.We thought that unaccountable capitalism was our ticket to cheaper goods, but are now discovering that we can no longer afford our dreams – a bad trade-off.  We’ll never admit it, naturally, but we permitted ourselves to underwrite the very existence of the wasteful marketplace.  Capitalism became flesh and walked around in us, driving our individual direction at the expense of our collective destiny.Allowing time to drive us as consumers, we pursued the goods and services we required only to discover that our kids can’t find work and are laden with student debt.  Our parents are increasingly isolated in seniors homes.  Our cities seem in decline.  And our dream of progress has left us collectively exhausted and spent.Along the way we have discovered that we ourselves have changed.  But not completely.  Just in time we are stopping ourselves from going over a cliff and asking if there is a better way that we can live together that combines both prosperity and valued communities?  That’s what the X conference was all about, in its own way.  We all collectively gathered in a room, mildly frenetic in our hold of the future, and seeking others to inform us how they made it work in their own communities.  In a phrase: we were in the process of rediscovering one another and it just so happened that our community was becoming a shared goal once again.And then there was our politics.  As fed up as we all were of the political class, we were nevertheless insightful enough to know that what we were seeking would be unattainable without a better politics itself.  In all of our distractions and divisions of the last few decades, we had lent out our public spirit to the professionals, who in turn morphed it into parties and sought to turn us against one another.  We had become what Albert Camus most feared: “When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.”And so it is … maybe.  That recent conference taught us a pivotal lesson: if we all failed collectively, then we can only succeed together.  I talked to many guests on that day who were finally giving voice to a recent understanding that if we keep contracting out everything about the way we live together, then we are no longer undertaking our own dreams as citizens, but merely following the designs of those we hired.  Moreover, we were discovering that such a path could no longer be afforded.The occasion is just right for cleaning up the waste time has left us with.  We were in too much of a hurry to notice, but we’re starting to understand that it can be recaptured, that we still have a personal and collective stake in helping our communities to thrive again – with us as the driving force, not some inanimate global trend.As the infamous Dr. Suess had one of his characters express: “How did it get so late so soon?”  Let’s approach time differently, not by revisiting it, but by reclaiming it.  Let’s put all our individual minutes together and make collective hours.  A reinvigorated community awaits, but only as we start treating time itself as an opportunity for rediscovering one another.  If the best way to predict our future is to create it ourselves, then we best get busy.