"No Worries"

During winter break, my family and I visited the town of Telluride, Colorado, which is nestled in the midst of the towering peaks of the San Juan mountain range. We came down with both altitude sickness and a new catch-phrase. The first time the surprising words were uttered, my family was riding on the local bus. My four year old was taking a while getting down the steep bus stairs in her ski boots. We tried to usher her down more quickly than she was moving… “No worries”, the bus driver told us. The next time I heard it, I needed quarters for the washing machine. I went into a local place to ask for change, simultaneously giving an explanation of why I was unprepared with the right number of coins… “No worries”, stated the guy behind the counter. Huh?

In the city in which I live, if my foot is not pressing the accelerator the millisecond the traffic signal switches from red to green, I will get honked at. After all, time is money is it not? Or, at least in a capitalist society it is. British economics professor Ian Walker even came up with an equation to support this bit of common wisdom:  V (value of an hour)=(W(wage)((100-t(time))/100))/C(cost of living) (CNN, 2002).
So this is what I’m wondering. Since when did greater society get so harried that it abandoned its rudimentary decency? And why am I buying into it? And more importantly, how can we get some of that unhurried, give-a-gal-a-break mentality back? In the spirit of new year's resolutions, I am going to propose three changes in my life that I hope will reflect my desire to become less frantic and a bit more...patient.

1. I will eat my meals (with a fellow human being, if possible) and most certainly without a humming piece of technology.

Attention! Blackberries, laptops, I-Pods, televisions, radios, and anything else that utilizes lithium-ion batteries or A/C electrical current- you are officially uninvited from my table.

2. I will cancel my cable subscription and wear out my library card, my sneakers, my colored pencils, my board games, and maybe even my crock-pot.

3. I will schedule one-and only one- activity per person per day in my household. I will no longer be rushing from French club to ballet class to flute lessons in one afternoon.

If I lag behind or regress to my old ways a bit?

No worries. I'm going to give this gal a break.

CNN (2002, May 29). Time is money professor proves. Retrieved on January 3, 2009 at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/05/29/time.money/