On taking the time
Sinus infections; home construction; the sadness (and anger and frustration and feeling of ok-what-do-I-need-to-do) of living with constant school shootings…
There’s a lot of reasons why someone may not write for a week or two, even when they promised themselves they would.
And though a lot of my writing explores the idea that ‘time’ is not something we have (or spend or use or waste, etc.) … I do believe in the concept of “taking the time” that we need, in spite of a culture that tries to hurry us along. I do believe in allowing time to continue through you, without any specific output required of you. (Of all the books I’ve read on ‘time’, perhaps the most enjoyable was Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks in which he expounds upon these ideas, translating a lot of philosophical ramblings into coherent sense for the current era.)
So, these last couple weeks I have been “taking the time”: to heal, to pack and clean, to play with my babies in the glorious spring sunshine, to join a local Moms Demand Action chapter.
Spring cleaning did hit the newsletter. At one point last week I suddenly decided to refresh the look and feel (and yes… even the name!) of this publication. Despite a background in brand strategy and a reverence for visual identity and mission statements and customer journeys and marketing funnels blah blah blah, I just don’t have the desire to formulate a super “branded” experience here. My hope for this newsletter is that it remains a space to consider the inconspicuous parts of consumer culture that we all sorta sense but don’t put to words often. I hope the result is an invitation to consume with more information and more intention— i.e., consciously.
Tomorrow we’re jumping back into our Tuesday series: twenty shades of time is money. In breaking down the primary cultural stance toward time (at least in the US, that time is primarily an economic resource), maybe we will better understand why consumer culture makes it SO hard to relish in the radical act of “taking the time”.
Thanks for being here,
Sarah