Time enough for love

Time enough for love is the title of a novel by Robert Heinlein, where Lazarus Long, a man who is thousands of years old, tells the story of his life. The title refers to a passage where Lazarus says that a normal span lifetime is just not enough time to really understand what love is about. If this is true (and who knows if it is?) our times must be when this is truer.  When we all live such busy lives, how many lifetimes would it take to understand the meaning of love?

This week has shown it beyond any doubt. It's been crazily busy for me, and love came demanding to fill in any available cracks, like one of those wild weeds that somehow manage to grow in the cracks of concrete. 

In spite of living in a houseboat, which is really cheap and would allow me to work part time, I actually work full time and get paid less than a similar job would normally pay, as it often happens when you work in the voluntary sector. Even Friday, when I was supposed to get half day off, was a full day because the boss wanted to have a full day meeting discussing all the long term strategic stuff that doesn't get dealt with on the day-to-day firefighting of IT issues. Predictably, even a whole day wasn't enough to discuss all the things that needed discussing.

My supposedly free time was fully booked as well. Tuesday it was the meeting of the Energy Group and Wednesday was the meeting of the Livelihoods Group. I don't normally go to the meetings of the Livelihoods Group, who are supposed to deal with helping business become sustainable and figuring how money is going to flow in a future steady-state no-growth economy. But this time I did, because the email announcement sounded like they finally were getting on their feet and doing some interesting work. It looks like I wasn't quite right, and the talk in the pub afterwards dragged on till very late. I haven't really caught on that lost sleep until today. 

Friday was the science-fiction writers meeting. One of the stories I didn't understand at all, the other one I really liked. It was a classic cyberpunk love story about a man falling in love with a sex doll, trying to find ways to hang on to her in spite of her programming to always go to new men, but in the end killing her. Maybe I liked it because in some way it mirrored what was happening in my own life: love finding space between the cracks of a fundamentally screwed-up world.

And if you think the other days of the week I had some breathing space, you'd be sadly mistaken. In between all this I've been trying to get speakers for the "Future of Brighton" event I mentioned in my last post. And I've finally decided to send my updated version of the "Limits to Growth" model to the Oil Drum website, after the nice Italian guy I met at the sustainability conference in Zurich kept asking me if he could include some graphs of mine on his report on the conference. And of course, now I got asked some questions about the model that I must work on now.

And in between all of this, I managed to squeeze in some space for love from not one, but two people. The Buddhist Engineer made some advances last weekend, after the Action Plan meeting. It was a tricky one because he's neither a 'Yes' nor a 'No', he's a 'Definitely maybe', and that's rather difficult to convey. We had some nice email exchanges and we talked again after the Energy Group meeting, and I think he got the message to hang fire. We also talked a lot about intuition. It came to light that, in spite of all his engineering background, he believes in some sort of magic and he thinks he's changed the course of events in the past. We'll see if he's got some juicy stories to tell. This could be fun, but I will have to handle it so very carefully.

Then, on Saturday I visited my Ex in prison. I spent a lot of time during the week thinking about him. I bought him a Valentine card with a ragged teddy bear almost covered in a sea of big hearts. Ideally, I would have wanted a Valentine card with a bird in a cage and another out of the cage, and a big heart in between, but I never get the cards I wish for. But anyway, I didn't find the time to write it and post it. I haven't written him a letter at all this week, no time for that. But I visited him in the end and I was wearing a suitable red top, and I told him how guilty I felt about not visiting him last weekend. He's as repentant as I could ever wish for, and I really should give him all my support.

Am I exceptional in finding no time for love? I don't think so. A look at government statistics will tell you that nowadays almost as many women are working as men, that commutes have got longer and longer, and children get less and less attention from their parents. The Western world has done a gigantic social experiment to find out what is the minimum family time that a human being needs, and what happens when that need isn't fulfilled. The answer doesn't look very pretty.