Since our lives are limited in time and marked by the responsibility of keeping ourselves alive for as long as physically possible, we end up using time with very little freedom, because time is the resource we invest most heavily in the process of survival.
For the ordinary individual, socialised into the obligation to work and the honour of having work, it is almost certain that there is a maximum amount of time demanded by the cumulative effort of earning various forms of merit, making free time virtually impossible.
And without free time there is no freedom, because freedom without time of its own is not freedom, but fear — the fear of wasting time.
We, then — the ordinary individuals who manufacture working days — live with a dilemma between committed time and free time.
Committed time is not free because the commitment is not voluntary, even though the way in which we use and experience that time may be transformed into acquiescence or even enjoyment.
The modern, urban organisation of life has turned almost every social commitment into work, because it demands usefulness from us, even when such commitments are supposedly intended to serve affection.
The vastness of duties and fashions establishes patterns of action that bring about a terrible erosion of the time that might otherwise remain free. And without time that we can protect from this erosion caused by duties, we are left in complete submission to usefulness, which weighs upon us like a yoke around a slave’s neck.
Even if, from a physical point of view, we were able to endure by balancing obligations and capacities within the same unit of useful time, on the spiritual plane it is far more difficult to create the silence that compensates for, or cancels out, the damage caused by the permanent clamour of work and the sociability it requires.
Silence is something that can only flourish when given the necessary time, because silence is time.
If we have no time for silence, it is because we have no time to listen to the World without the utilitarianism of habitual conversation, and that is a sentence from which there is no emancipation.
The need for silence is therefore equivalent to the demand for free time, because only by devoting it to silence can we attain a share of true freedom, proportionate to the usefulness imposed upon the time we give to the World.
It is in this context that weekends and holidays may constitute the greatest civilisational invention of modernity, attempting to restore intimate time to those dispossessed by the utilitarianism of everyday life.
By freeing time from work and returning to the individual sovereignty over part of their usable time, we travel against the current of ordinary days, opening a window onto the Universe and creating the potential for a spiritualisation of time capable of carrying us back to the primitive wonder, to that primordial silence, to that free time whose memory still endures in the mitochondria of men and women as an essential question about what we are and what we are doing in this World.
That time of primordial silence inhabits us when we are born and exists within us before we are able to perceive it and tame it through the utilitarian configuration of work and the social clamour that fills the rest of our lives.
With a few grains of this time/silence, perhaps different kinds of human beings can be invented: creatures who are necessary before they are useful, and free even after committing themselves to the World.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
