CrazyBusy by Edward M. Hallowell M.D

Author:Edward M. Hallowell, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307414854
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

22 “Folks Ain’t Got No Time”

I was standing in line at Logan Airport waiting to pass through security one day when out of nowhere a man barreled into the line, waving his ticket, shouting, “I’m gonna miss my plane! You gotta let me through.” His briefcase and suit couldn’t conceal the primitive person he’d become as he pushed and shoved at all of us. Lurching ahead, he knocked an elderly man to the floor and didn’t even notice he’d done it.

As I helped the old man to his feet, he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Thank you, thank you.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m just fine, my friend, just fine. I’m always glad to be alive. But that man there, he’s got problems. Folks just ain’t got no time no more.”

I smiled at my new friend and said, “Ain’t that the truth.” He smiled back at me, and we spent the rest of our time in line talking to each other about life and the Boston Red Sox.

Writing this book, I often think of that friend, whom I never saw again. Since, as my friend said, nobody got no time, who’s gonna read what I write? Why write if no one reads? But then I think, maybe people will at least have time to take a bite out of it.

Not having time to read the book, people might make time to eat it. We often eat books these days, just as we eat magazines and newspapers and any other written material bearing more words than a billboard.

We used to read books all the way through, at least now and then. No time for that now. Now we want the abstract, the gist, the elevator pitch, the dumbed-down version, the bare bones, the meat, just the facts, the CliffsNotes, the Classics Illustrated version. At Harvard Business School, students are taught how to 80/20 an article, business plan, or other piece of writing. To 80/20 a piece, you flip through it, mentally excising the 20 percent that will give you all you really need. (If this can be done, you have to wonder why the other 80 percent was written at all.) But even 80/20’ing can take too much time.

So we clever, modern people have devised a new way of getting at words, a method I call “eating.” Eating words means doing whatever you have to do to chomp down the essentials in a written piece. You bite into this paragraph, flip a chunk of pages ahead, graze down another page or two, chew on the jacket notes, consume the table of contents, wolf down a few more paragraphs if your interest has been piqued, then close the book, most likely forever. You’ve eaten it. You’ve ripped it open and forced down all you could as time hovered over you, impatient to rush you off to some other place where you will feel rushed to go off to yet another spot. Sequential, word-by-word, page-by-page reading is so slow, so twentieth century.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.