Free Time for a Free People

Several years ago, I went to a folk festival in Philadelphia. Many of the performers sang labor songs of the 1930s, civil rights songs of the 1960s, peace songs of many decades. The audience sang along, nostalgia strong in the air. Then Charlie King began singing a song with the refrain, "What ever happened to the eight-hour day? When did they take it away?... When did we give it away?" And the audience roared. This was our lives, not something from the past.

Suddenly I saw that my sense of overwork, of teetering on the edge of burnout, was not mine alone. Something was in the air. I began to talk with others, especially with people whose religious and spiritual traditions call for some time to reflect, to be calm, to refrain from Doing and Making in order to Be and to Love. Out of those discussions has come an effort that brings Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Unitarians and secular intellectuals together to redress the rhythms of work and family time, community time, spiritual time. Free time and you free people. Free time not just through the ancient practice of the Sabbath but also through new ways, appropriate to an industrial/informational economy, of pausing from overwork and overstress.

Juliet Schor of Harvard wrote a book, The Overworked American, in which she showed that the promise made to us thirty years ago--that the new computer technology would give us more leisure time--has been betrayed. Most Americans work longer hours, under more tension, than they did a generation ago.

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