Time
Of the three types of input that every activity needs, material goods, skills, and time, I've come to feel that perhaps the least understood is time. In conventional economics, it is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold at will, and therefore needing no special consideration. Yet experience suggests that the economics of time is not quite so simple.
We need time to work, to eat, to sleep, and to accomplish all the daily chores of living. We also need time to know and understand our mates, our children, and our friends. Most of our relationships, in fact, require more time than we have, and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that we could never have enough. Nor is our list of demands on our time complete. We have ignored the time we need to be alone, a necessary but invariably short- changed period.
I know many people, myself included, who often feel "time poor" and who bemoan this limitation. Perhaps this attitude is a great mistake. Perhaps if we were to embrace the limitations of time, to celebrate them and explore their implications, we would find that they hold an essential key to the fundamental attitudes and experiences we will need in a humane sustainable culture.
