…time

Time, I’m realizing, is an incredibly relative concept. You can’t define time, but we all acknowledge that it exists. Somehow we wanted to give a measure to living life. We can’t track how many breaths we breathe or how many steps we take, but we can count how many times a dial spins around. Over time (ahem… I tried to avoid it, I did) we began to accept rotations of that dial as measurements for how much we could or should accomplish – how long we work, how fast we drive, how much “life” we can live before our next assignment. Gradually we became slaves to the clock, for better or worse.

As you travel from one culture to another, it becomes obvious that time is different. It is not that different cultures have different measures of time – a second still ticks to a minute to an hour. Other cultures just value the seconds, minutes, and hours differently. If you live in the Midwest, an hour of driving should get you just about 55 miles away from your starting point. If you live in Spain, that hour of driving gets you maybe 50 miles. The cars are, in many cases, identical. The difference is how time is valued. Critics of the American hustle would say that Spain values safety over a few extra minutes, and with less than half the amount of road fatalities per year per 100,000 vehicles on the road, they might be accurate in that assertion. On the other hand, none of those Spaniards are driving in a blizzard, sandwiched between a pair of commercial semi trucks.

In the American culture, we measure things we like in the number of that thing we do – how many episodes we watched, how many games we played, how many shots we took. We measure the things we don’t like in painfully long hours – how many hours we worked, how many hours it took to clean, how many hours we spent on homework. That should tell us something; time isn’t necessarily a positive measurement. It is, however, insanely practical to have a standard measurement.

That standard only applies from the Cali Coast to the Jersey Shore. Across the pond, time is a very different concept. A walk that takes roughly 20 minutes in American steps is a leisurely 30-40 minute stroll. Church bells that ring on the hour often chime at 9:12 to start the day. Meeting somewhere at 7 means you will be sitting in the street by yourself if you show up before 7:15. Taking a power nap means cutting the four-hour siesta in half, not snoozing for 20 minutes.

Now, something about this is admirable. Spaniards place a much higher value on relationships and enjoying themselves than Americans. Meals take hours, and coffee doesn’t come in to-go cups. Chatting after class ends up with tapas at the bar and talking for hours. Everything is fun and nothing actually has to get done.

There’s the catch that wrings the American’s brains out. Because nothing has to get done, nothing gets done. Nothing. (Hold on… Here it comes…) The Sevillans have no drive, no motivation, no desire to actually do anything. It’s maddeningly simplistic. Seconds tick into hours as days slip into oblivion with absolutely nothing to show for them. (Okay. Breathe.)

I say ‘Sevillans’ and not ‘Spaniards’ because I now know that the lazy, goal-less ocean of apathetic glee I’m drowning in stops with the borders of the city. Paris is a shoulders-back, chin-up city of brisk walking and wonderfully efficient public transportation. Barcelona has a collectively driven, bring-on-the-world mentality. There are cities in Europe – cities in Spain – that could drop into America and get along just fine. Then there’s this Seville thing, which Americans would trample.

It’s not that Seville is a bad city, or that the people are unkind. It’s not even a sympathetic case of unemployment and educational mediocrity – it’s that they plain don’t care. They don’t plan to leave Seville (ever), so they have no need to push themselves. They have no goals, no dreams, no top-shelf aspirations. (To the Sevillans that are reading this, I’m speaking of the collective whole. Those of you that are making an effort to connect with international students and dream of studying in the United States – you are not this way. Your drive is impressive, and even more so given the culture of this city.) It’s a city content to just exist.

It’s important to have an open mind about this. I want to look at this new way of living life and find the benefits. There is little stress, tasks are far less imposing, and deadlines are gentle boundaries – more like sidewalks than brick walls. People spend a majority of their day talking with friends. Checklists don’t exist, so there is never the feeling of not getting something done that needed to get done.

Try as I might, though, I can’t make it work. I haven’t siesta-ed once. The closest I’ve gotten to napping all afternoon is watching a movie. I walk to class in 20 minutes, passing hoards of locals in the process. I drink my hot chocolate in gulps rather than tastes. I’m at class on time and scroll through ESPN articles for 10 minutes waiting for the professor to show up. I never planned on becoming a Spaniard – I know that I’m an American and I’m living here temporarily. I didn’t know that time – something I believed to be a universal concept – had such drastically different meanings in different cultures.

Measuring time is even different. You can measure how much time has passed by looking at a clock or a calendar. I can tell how long I’ve been here by how many vitamins are left in the bottle. I can judge how busy I have been by how long it takes to post the next blog. (Three weeks – I know. To be fair: I’ve written three in this time span, but they have not been published.) Seville simply runs on a different clock. The things that matter get done – Feria, for instance (the city-wide, week-long party) is ready to go at midnight on the dot. Semana Santa (Holy Week) is expertly orchestrated and operates seamlessly for an entire week. Clearly Sevillans are capable of a more rigid time structure. They choose to live without a clock – they choose to accept that things may or may not get done – they choose to enjoy their time with friends – they choose to live the life they know, without questioning if maybe there’s another way to live.

Americans can’t do it. We’re slaves to the clock – it’s pedal to the metal until the engine blows. Every second counts and we count every second. We squeeze things into our schedule, even if it cramps the other things in our day. We sacrifice personality for productivity. In the end, we are an impressively efficient, driven, progressing society. The ceiling is glass if there’s a ceiling at all. We live for one more, one faster, and one better.

Somewhere in the middle is this place where things get done and people take time to enjoy the accomplishment. There’s a place where people work hard and play hard. Americans get lost in the drive and forget to stop and look around now and then. Sevillans look around all the time and never move toward anything. I’m not saying it’s bad to push the limits, and I’m not saying it’s bad to smell the roses. I’m saying time is relative; we made it up, and it can’t last forever. Someday our idea of time will be gone as eternity becomes reality, and I think we’ll realize it didn’t matter how much we did or didn’t do – it’s about how much we loved and lived along the way. If you’re going to keep track of it, make sure you’re doing something worth your time.