The breathless grind

We met to discuss our 'revising and completing things' exercise today. We'd all struggled with it, especially with finding time to give it the attention it needs. The meeting itself was in the middle of a headless chicken kind of working day.

It made me think of a passage from 'Zen and the Beat Way' where Alan Watts quotes Robert Lawlor's book 'Voices of the First Day'.

"The materialistic industrial societies are increasingly caught in a round-the-clock whirl in which people are trapped, day after day, in a breathless grind of facing deadlines, racing the clock between several jobs, and trying to raise children and rush through the household chores at the same time. Agriculture and industrialism, in reality, have created a glut of material goods and a great poverty of time. Most people have a way of life devoid of everything except maintaining and servicing their material existence 12 to 14 hours a day. In contrast, the Aborigines [spent] 12 to 14 hours a day in cultural pursuit. "