Time

Time.  As much as language is an explicit representation of a difference in understanding between American and Japanese culture, I think so too is the way that we feel time.  Perhaps it is far more elusive to translate, far more difficult to feel; perhaps because time is connected to things beyond itself, things such as individuality and a sense of ownership.  Who owns the time in which we live?  Do we own our time when we are alone?  Sometimes even without others we are doing things in their service.  Is that our time?  And what of the time when we are not alone?

In a week of doing far more rehearsal and preparation for a short Christmas lobby performance than I am accustomed, I feel myself reverting to a feeling of wanting to increase efficiency, cut corners where possible.  I feel myself wanting "my" time.  I think it highlights a difference in time that I have experienced here versus America.  In my head I think of "hoarding time," as an American thing.  It's "my" time.  How do I increase my ownership of "my" time?  How do I have more time?  How can I make this take less time, do it faster, more efficiently, get more out of my time?  Time is money.  I need more time.  I'm too busy, I don't have time.

Here time feels more like a shared commodity.  There is less clinging to it, less entitlement.  Maybe this is what I feel as people take time to care about details.  It seems that corners get cut less often than America, even if it feels inefficient to my normal way of living.  The practice of taking, or rather giving time; a pace that can be as foreign as the language, if not more so.  

What is it to "own" time?  Perhaps even as I am paid to give up the right of my time to another (i.e. "working a job") I don't actually have to hand over this commodity.  If I am present, how can another claim the time in which I live?  And maybe this presence is another thing to learn of this place; another thing connected to time and the way in which it interacts with living life.

It can be a challenge to relax into it, to give up the entitlement and ownership that I've learned for so long.  But I realize the value very much.  It is something deeper than language, a new way of breathing, a new way of feeling.  Perhaps not better or worse, but one that has much to offer as I learn a new way of living.