Working to the water

Fishermen on a lake like Burullus have never kept office hours. They go out when the water and the wind allow, and they come back when the work is done.

Most of the rest of us live by the clock, and it is easy to forget that the clock is a choice somebody made for us. It is not a fact of nature like the tide. It spread with factories and railway timetables, to get many people to the same place at the same minute. It is very good at that. It is not neutral about what we do once we arrive.

A day run by the clock tends to measure the wrong thing. It asks how long, not what for. Eight hours at a desk, forty minutes for the lesson, the shutters down at ten. The hours get filled, because hours always do, and at the end the question of whether anything worthwhile happened goes unasked.

There is nothing wrong with keeping time. Time spent on purpose is the best tool any of us has. The trouble begins when there is no purpose underneath, no clear sense of what the day is for. Then the clock is happy to supply one. Be here at nine. Leave at five. Check again in ten minutes.

The fisherman watches the water because he knows what he went out to bring back. Without something like that of our own, the clock will decide how the day is spent, and it has no interest at all in what we bring home.