Plato once said that it is the job of the teacher to introduce his students to the best possible circle of friends. A great teacher is capable of making the ideas of wise and interesting people, living or dead, come to life so brilliantly and imaginatively that students actually feel they know them. Many people in this room knew Gold Metcalf. They admired his enthusiasm for life and love of nature. Like Plato, they want to keep his ideas alive for you. And through this lecture series, they want to introduce you to others who are equally passionate and full of enthusiasm for life. Had technology been as good sixty years ago as it is today, we could have preserved his lectures and been able to listen to his own unique voice for the magic and inspiration that made his students and colleagues so want to honor him.

I read the statement attributed to Gold on the school website. I saw his picture. I watched the DVD tribute to him. I wished he’d been my uncle, or my teacher. But he can still be my friend – and yours if we can just listen. So, be very still and quiet for just a moment and then I will read his words to you, the next generation of children he so passionately wanted to reach. And Gold said,

“we must bequeath to our children the exuberant joy of being able to breathe fresh air, to drink clean water, to scent trailing arbutus, to hear breezes in the top of a grove of white pines and the magic of the song of a hermit thrush in cathedral towers of red spruce, and to find individuals living in harmony with the land and with each other.”

Thank you, Gold, for adding your voice to that of countless other heroes from Muir to Mather, and from Thoreau to Thomas Berry. Every older professional in this room is part of that chorus, too. We are the background singers who have kept the beat going with classes of our own and causes that defend what we and Gold believe is sacred…time, place, and relationships.

I am a city girl. I was raised in a narrow row house in Baltimore City. I never saw, as a child, the wide open spaces, the expanse of stars, or many of the things that Gold so loved. The first expanse of green grass that I ever saw was at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium when I was lucky enough to get to see the Orioles play on that beautifully mowed, bright green field.

I was formed and informed by the sixties, a child of hope from a generation that wanted world peace, and human rights, and an end to poverty. We protested and claimed that we loved truth and justice more than money, but my generation quickly fell silent, slipping into our private worlds of property, prosperity, and safety. We grew hungry for stuff. We parlayed our parent’s work ethic to a level of success that afforded the opportunity to have more and more if we were willing to work the extra hours to get it. We now purchase goods at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. We cast off perfectly good things simply because we tire of them. We are a throw-away people who mistake titillation for joy and activity for leisure. Some might say that we sold out. Others would claim that we grew tired and cynical, withdrawing into a philosophy of self-interest. There have remained enough of us, however, who are faithful to values that we believe are timeless.

My husband, Dennis, and I have five children, ages 31-21. We are parents and teachers of four boys and a girl. We want to introduce them to the best possible circle of friends whose wisdom can carry them through all the current crises that face your generation. Today I am going to talk to you about one of those crises – time poverty. My hope is that you will have, by the end of my short visit with you, an awakening, however small, that could impact the remainder of your life.

I’m sure you know that from time to time over history there have been people who carried placards or shouted in town squares that the end was near, that time was running out. The message of these individuals has classically been that we must turn our lives around, repent, so to speak, and wake up. Admonitions of doom often accompanied the message as people used whatever means they had to persuade or frighten their fellow citizens into looking at themselves more critically.

We now know from modern physics that time isn’t at all what we think it is. It is one of many dimensions of reality, but it is purely man-made, an invention of convenience that ordered society and helped it manage the ordinary activities of life, especially industrialized work. An understanding of time allowed us to sequence our human history and that of the planet. But time is still a human invention, one that may have seemed helpful at the outset but has taken on a life of its own.

Once electricity was invented, and the lights could stay on day and night, the rhythm of the day produced naturally by sunrise and sunset gave way to an endless day, limited only by our human inability to remain perpetually conscious, that is, our need to sleep. Unfortunately, human evolution hasn’t moved quickly enough to keep pace with the race to pack more into the day, so we are a country and culture that is chronically sleep deprived. We are sleep deprived because we can’t create more time than our clocks and calendars allow. So, to compensate, we simply push the envelope to its breaking point, snatching time from one event or activity of daily living to shore up a gap of need in another area.

I love the way that language subtly but surely invokes the doomsday message – we have “dead” lines; we complain that we are “dead” tired; we ask if we are willing to “drink the Koolaid” for our employer. We extol the virtues of multi-tasking, praising those who can accomplish so much more in a given amount of time. The rest of the country places you all on a pedestal when it declares that something was done in “a New York minute,” while we in the South are perceived as slow, the implication being that we’re dim-witted. The abandonment of nature as our chief time-guide has, ironically, led to the infusion of phrases related to nature to explain an ideal kind of time use: we say, “if only we could stop and smell the roses” or “I just want to have my day in the sun.”

America leads the world, if not in its obsession with time, then at least its need to spend it. What we’ve called progress in reality is a staggering list of real deficits in quality of life indicators. I asked Joe Robinson, author of Work to Live, to share some facts with us. And I’ve included some additional notes from John de Graaf that you might want to read. There is a bibliography included, too, that can help you find some great sources for your personal or school library.

I knew about John de Graaf before I met him. A friend had given me a tape of Affluenza years earlier. Later, when I learned that John had produced Running Out of Time, I bought it to show in my Introduction to Leisure Studies course. I wrote to John to thank him for his dedication to this issue and gave him my views as an educator in the field of recreation. He invited me to be part of a board that he was forming for his organization, Take Back Your Time. Ben Hunnicut, from Iowa, who was featured in Running Out of Time as the recreation educator who made sure his work did not interfere with time for his daughter, was already involved and had written a chapter for the Take Back Your Time book which John edited.

I flew out to Seattle to their conference and met some of the most committed individuals in the country, people from all walks of life, who want to initiate a grass roots change to our culture of time poverty. Picture this – a weekend with top professionals from business, economics, journalism, philosophy, theology, psychology, counseling and other disciplines who have committed themselves and their resources to support the value of leisure. It was like being in a room full of cheerleaders. So often our field is overlooked – there it was the center of attention because everyone in the movement sees leisure as the missing link to the good life and time poverty as the culprit keeping it at bay.

These individuals, and many others who are affiliated with related social movements, are hoping that the imagination of Americans will be sparked by their efforts to awaken our citizens to this key quality of life issue. Last year John released another video called The Motherhood Manifesto which I understand was viewed here at SUNY on Take Back Your Time Day, October 24^th. The sad facts illuminated in The Motherhood Manifesto should be the topic of discussion at every women’s group in the country. As I watched it, I realized that the concerns I’d been having about my own adult children and their ability to have a work/life balance that could support family life were well documented.

Frankly, I was really frightened. I began to think about more ways to help them reduce their school loan debts, cover their medical needs, and secure some savings for the future. I thought about remodeling my house to make room for any of them who are unable to secure a home for a period of time. Like my parents who lived through The Great Depression of the early 1930s, I want to hedge my bets and store away some resources in case of an economic or natural crisis. I am optimistic but realistic, and ultimately, as a parent and global citizen, very concerned.

The bottom line is that we are a nation that has overstretched itself in terms of the competing demands of work and family. Personal leisure and play, something that we all need at every stage of life, is seriously threatened on several fronts. Time poverty is being matched with real decline in the availability of discretionary income and credit. In his presentation called What’s the Economy For, John de Graaf notes that Europeans’ level of productivity is 95% of Americans’. Yet they work substantially fewer weeks each year. John writes, “We could say that Europeans traded major portions of their productivity increases for free time instead of money, while Americans – consciously or unconsciously – put all their gains into increasing their per capita gross domestic product.”

John adds that Abraham Maslow noted in the early 70s “that as a society the U.S. had met nearly all its citizens’ physiological and safety needs and was moving to satisfy higher needs as well. Ironically, by such a standard, we have lost ground rather than gained it – we have more citizens living in poverty and a much greater overall sense of insecurity today than we did then, despite more than a 60% increase in GDP per capita.” And, John notes, “For most of the final quarter of the 20^th century, Europeans gained relative to Americans in almost every quality of life indicator.” Here are some bullet points from John’s talk:

Some common causes of time poverty according to John de Graaf:

Shopping fever: Americans spend on the average about 7 times more time shopping as we do playing with our kids.

Swollen expectations: Our garages are now as big as starter homes were in 1950, and our houses are three times as big, even though our families are smaller.

Chronic congestion: Our roads, landfills are congested, and our bigger homes are so congested that many of us need extra storage lockers to hold all our stuff.

A Rash of bankruptcies: In each of the five years prior to the change in the bankruptcy laws, more Americans declared bankruptcy than have graduated from college, more in fact than were declared during the Depression.

Credit Card debt: This is a leading cause of students having to drop out of college. 60% of Americans feel their children are very materialistic. Kids are referred to by marketers as “consumers in training.” Marketers “own, brand, and capture” kids.

Resource consumption and industrial diarrhea: we can’t environmentally sustain our highly consumptive life styles. While we have far more than we need, more than a billion people on the planet have far less than they need just to subsist.

The stress of excess: Most Western Europeans work nine full weeks less than Americans each year or one full year for every five that we work. They simply choose to produce less stuff per capita, to value time more than money.

Job Stress: Job stress costs our economy $200 billion every year. Americans suffer from “hurry sickness” brought on by overwork and time pressure. Americans get an hour less sleep per night than they need to function well.

Too little exercise and far too much over-processed foods: Our sedentary lifestyles and high calorie foods combine to produce an increase in obesity in alarming rates in both children and adults.

Less time with family than in the past: Compared with the 1960’s, Americans now spend 40% less time with their children.

Overwork or underemployment: These are two sides of the same coin, but the result for both groups, due to less time or fewer resources, is diminished leisure.

Threats to security: Time poverty leads to a frenetic sense of rushing and short-temperedness. Too little sleep contributes to this combination of fatigue and anger.

Threats to the environment: Time poverty leads to less time for recycling, accessing slow foods, or using non-disposable products.

Less participation as citizens: 33% of non-voters in America report that they simply don’t have the time to vote.

The real question that John asks of the economy is this: is it “possible to have a more just and people friendly economy and compete globally?” All of us who support the cultural critique outlined in Take Back Your Time believe that we must create a shift in thought across cultures in the U.S. toward a better quality of life that is sustainable over the coming decades. What images can be put in front of people’s eyes to present a better way of living, one that allows parents to be more involved in their children’s lives and have time for personal leisure and community involvement? Or, one that encourages everyone to live a life that is slower, more integrated and balanced, more environmentally friendly and respectful of the resources that are needed around the world? What images have always made a connection with the soul?

The National Recreation and Park Association has tried with its new slogan, “It starts in the parks,” to point again to engagement with nature as the benchmark for balance. Like nature, human life requires care and time, and natural environments are a great mirror for a healthy life. By engaging them early and often, we can more clearly see that every person needs a rhythm of life, ample outdoor play, rest, and time for relationships.

I once asked John de Graaf about any sentinel event that moved him toward the commitment he has to quality time. He said that when he was young, his dad took him to the state and national parks and introduced him to nature. He loved it. He saw the depth of beauty there, and it touched his soul. Joe Robinson was similarly moved by the experiences he had as a journalist covering outdoor recreation and leisure. He realized that we must intentionally commit ourselves to make time for play and recreation. Joe is so committed to the value of leisure that he leads a campaign to legally protect Americans’ vacation leave. Here are some comments from Joe to help you further understand his message:

Many thanks to Joe Robinson, author of Work to Live, writer, journalist, and national director of the mandatory paid vacation legislative initiative for the following: