Whole Time Planners: Why

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1. Organic vs. Mechanical Time

We typicaly measure time either organically or mechanically. Organic ways to measure time include keeping track of the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, or our own heartbeats. Mechanical measures are clocks and watches of all kinds. Those of us immersed in the technological culture of the western world generally rely on clock-time to tell us when to eat, sleep, work, get the kids, and love each other. Clock-time supports many arguable benefits, such as airline travel, an increasingly global communications network, and public education. But sometimes we take a good thing too far by neglecting the rhythms of organic, life-sustaining processes and the information they convey. We leave ourselves vulnerable to believing that all food comes from grocery stores and that reality is found on TV. Distractions R Us. Whole Time Planners offers a slightly different take on time, metaphoric assistance for tuning in to the organic, underlying rhythm of our weeks.

The mechanized world also tends to be overly linear. The assembly line is one of its most often-cited achievements, but the economics of big machines -- gotta keep ’em running, time is money -- emphasize quantity and uniformity over quality and uniqueness. The days on square-based calendars march along single file, like containers on an assembly line, waiting to be filled. This may work if you subscribe to the idea that “he who dies with the most toys wins,” but may be less satisfying if you’re looking instead for patterns of culmination, completion -- wholeness. Whole Time Planners offer a more organic metaphor for our time, inviting us to tend our lives like a garden.

2. Our Mother, Who Art the Earth ...

Art historians, liberal theologians, and others who delve into the creative workings of the myth-making side of the brain tell us that circular imagery invokes the feminine aspect of divinity, which is often notably absent among the frequently feuding worshippers of a single male deity.

Kitchen-table theology: Think of the Earth, the Mother of Us All, rounding up her squabbling monotheistic offspring, saying, “Come on, kids, there’s plenty to go around if you can just learn to share. Let’s have some cookies and milk.”

Whole Time Planners, made in Her image, help us remember to honor the female side of God and the sometimes-overlooked contributions of mothers. I have this vague sense that the upwelling, nurturing energy of God the Mother is routinely chopped into bits by the way we understand time, space, and accomplishment. She is patient, but how much more does she have to give?

What would the world look like if we spent as much time and energy invoking God the Mother as we do God the Father?

3. Towards Sustainable Living

What if we thought about how to strengthen ground-level, life-sustaining processes at least as often as we thought about how to make money? What if big, powerful institutions knew how to cultivate and nurture the grassroots, and did? Planning time with circles can be an antidote to the spreadsheet cells that blanket the world and reduce too many decisions to economics and efficiency, as though that's all there is. What if we thought about how to keep water flowing in remote villages in the developing world with the same energy, creativity, and organization we bring to selling bottled beverages? What if we brought as much legal firepower to delivering preventive health care to all children as health insurance companies bring to ensuring that they turn a profit? What if we made human rights the centerpiece of our foreign policy? We can strike a better balance between livelihood, profit, and life.

Updated November 22, 2009