Changing our Relationship with Time from Productivity to Presence

Judaism for the Thinking Person

It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...). This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other. We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments. We live outside of time, in a negative relationship, rather than in time, in a positive relationship. Using Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I reflect on how the pandemic first connected us to a positive relationship with time, vis a vis the Sabbatical Year, but then jerked us back to the negative relationship, as demands for productivity --now virtually impossible and harder than before-- were placed on our backs. How can we live in time, not through the standard of productivity, but through the invitation of presence?