Daylight Savings Time has ended and now it’s dark at 5 PM in Seattle. I’ve been threatening for years to start a movement to end Daylight Savings Time. The abrupt shift of hours, which doesn’t actually shift time, but just shifts what we call it, is not only arbitrary but actually disruptive. But it doesn’t fool the chickens.

My friend, Lyanda Haupt, author of Crow Planet, a book about that most urban of birds, wrote a blog post about how her chickens are not fooled by the shift out of Daylight Savings Time. They are going to sleep earlier and earlier, triggered by the cold and the dark. (She also wrote a lovely review of my book, Slow Time, but that’s not why I’m sending you there; I just thought the chickens had the right idea and I want to champion the idea of Chicken Time, a new kind of Slow Time.)

Lyanda’s chickens, tucked in for the night

Two words that seem at odds at first, but what I am interested in writing about is neither tango or sabbaticals, but the pleasure of returning to something you know well with fresh eyes after taking time off. This notion goes against the prevailing myth of progress, in which one practices and practices and gets better and better. Sometimes one has to stop or go backwards to move forwards. That is true for me with tango.

Let me tell you a little about my history with tango. I started with one tango class which lasted for six weeks. After the class was over, I went to my first tango dance. I sat there in my short black dress and high-heeled shoes and watched the accomplished dancers tracing fancy arabesques on the floor, and realized I knew nothing. When a man approached and asked me to dance, I said no and fled. Tango was over for me.

But about a year later, I went to a Dance Week at Stanford during the summer and signed up for two tango classes. One was a beginning class taught by two San Francisco teachers who had the students switch roles frequently. It was illuminating to see tango from both sides. But it was the Intermediate class that hooked me forever. The teacher was from Argentina. He taught only to the men, explaining the moves he wanted them to make, and he did not insure that students rotated to new partners, so you had to grab a partner at the start of class and hold on tight or you would be lost (there’s almost always an extra woman or two at dance classes). And holding on tight was the point. He was teaching the milonguero style of tango, which is also called close embrace. His best instruction for the women was simple: close your eyes and try not to think. What is left? Music and two bodies moving together. It’s a state of both hyper awareness and total surrender. So that’s what I did throughout those summer afternoons, emerging from each class as if in a dream.

Back in Seattle, I vowed to become good at tango. I took classes. I attended dances. Tango has a way of becoming an addiction and most tango dancers in Seattle (which is one of the top tango cities in America) dance three to four nights a week. So did I. But after about five years, I found I was not getting any better. Worse yet, I stopped enjoying the dance. The flame had died for me. I stopped going to dances and blamed this on being “too busy.”

Then this summer time opened up for me again, as if often does in summer and I decided to take a tango class. I wanted to study with a young man, Jaimes Friedgen, who is a beautiful tango dancer. The last time I looked at his web site, he was offering only five classes. Now, two years later, he has developed a sophisticated curriculum with a sequence of fifteen classes, which should be taken in order. He recommended starting at the beginning, even for dancers with some experience. So I signed up for the beginning class, secretly hoping Jaimes would recognize my ability and suggest that I move on to a more advanced class.

Now I wouldn’t move if he asked me to. I love the freedom of having no expectations. No one expects me to be any good so the pressure is off. For the first three classes, we will be moving in unison with our partners, without using our arms, but relying on visual cues and physical momentum. While difficult, this will allow us to be more flexible later. I realized that this has been my problem since I first learned tango. I hold all my tension in my arms and shoulders so when I get anxious my grip becomes quite rigid. No wonder I wasn’t able to loosen up enough to follow my partners through some of the more intricate steps they wanted to lead. I come away from every new tango lesson glowing with pleasure. The dance is alive for me once more.

And I can look forward to a long life in tango. It is one of those dances that generously welcomes young and old and everyone in between. In an era where dancers on TV shows learn routines in one week and the audience perceives this progress in a fast five minute segment, tango is truly a dance of Slow Time. It would probably take about five years to be considered an intermediate level tango dancer (assuming you dance three nights a week) and twenty years to be an advanced dancer. I have the time.

One of the major sporting events in Cape Town, South Africa (where I have the joy of living!) is the annual Cape Argus/Pick n Pay cycle tour that snakes for 109km around the Cape Peninsula.

35 000 cyclists descend on Cape Town for this famous spectacle.

One of the most often heard questions after the race is:”What was your time?”

Pages and pages of names and finish times are published a few days after the event, and people make promises to finish in a shorter time next year.

This is a rather linear way of looking at what this great event can bring.

How about asking questions like:

“Who did you meet along the way?”

“Did you also get the baboons at the turn off to Cape Point?”

“DId you pull off for that great massage at Tokai?”

It begs a response that is very different from the linear “so many hours and minutes” reply.

It begs a response about the experience of the experience…

The ancient Greeks, as I understand it, had three concepts/words for time:

* chronos: linear, measured, “clock” time.  1 hour + 1 hour = 2 hours.

* kairos: experiential time

* eon (aeon): An immeasurable or infinite space of time; eternity; a long space of time; an age (from www.dictionary.com)

From Wikipedia:

“While [chronos] refers to chronological or sequential time, [kairos] signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.”

I like this example: A golfer hits a hole-in-one. Or you bungy from the highest bridge in Africa.

* Chronos: How long did it take?  Less than a minute.

* Kairos: How did you experience it? How does it feel?  Great!  Fantastic! Unbelievable! Heehaaaa!

* Eon: How long will you remember this for?  For the rest of my life.

An important question arises: Do we (should we) not do things and live life for long term impact rather than instant gratification and short term gain (often at the expense of generations to come)?

If so, then let’s think where the long term impact (e.g. “I will remember it forever”) comes from  - from how long it took, or from what you did and experienced?

The answer is obvious: eon comes from kairos, not chronos.  It comes from what you do and experience and not how long it takes.

Yet we tend to focus so much on speeding things up rather than slowing things down.

The “fast productivity” question is: “How long will the meeting take?”.

The “slow productivity” question is” “Should we even have this meeting?”

So many people complain about attending unproductive meetings, yet they do not question the meeting.

Rather than keep on rushing from one meeting to the next, just stop the meeting madness for a moment and ask the Slow Productivity questions: “Why are we meeting?”, “What is the desired outcome?”, “What do you want me to come and to at your meeting?”.

If there are no clear and meaningful answers to these questions - don’t go!

In Africa we have the concept of “African time”.

From Wikipedia: “Africa time” or African time is a colloquial term used to describe a perceived cultural tendency, in some parts of Africa, toward a more relaxed attitude to time. This is sometimes used in a negative sense, about tardiness in appointments, meetings and events. The term is also sometimes used to describe the more leisurely, relaxed and less rigorously scheduled lifestyle found in these countries, especially as opposed to the more hectic, clock-bound pace of daily life in Western countries.  In October 2007, an Ivorian campaign against African time, [had] the slogan… “‘African time’ is killing Africa - let’s fight it.”

But is it?  Or is the clock from the West killing the real spirit of Africa?

Maybe Slow Productivity can embrace practical ways of exploring African time and Slow Time for paradoxically improving productivity?

“Ex Africa semper aliquid novi” - Out of Africa there is always something new.

Maybe the time for African Time is here if we want to have more sanity and improved quality of life and less rush; enjoy more of kairos and be less enslaved to chronos?

Only time will tell.