I have sometimes liked to imagine the hours in a day, or a week or a month, like swaths of fabric hanging in a clothing shop. Some are coarse and practical, others stretchy and deliciously frivolous. Some are filmy, made to be worn with weightless ease.
The most elastic that hours have ever felt to me was on Saturday afternoons when I was a child. My family observed the Sabbath, which meant that from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday we abstained: from driving and typing, from music and phone calls, from handling computers and spending cash. All those rules meant that time could seem like a problem in need of solving. There was too much of it and too little to do, the minutes seeming to multiply like pasta in Strega Nona’s pot. I disappeared into the worlds of Fudge, Matilda and James with his giant peach. I put on productions of “Peter Pan,” in which I cast myself as Peter, Wendy and Captain Hook, and my little brother as the crocodile.
I stopped keeping the Sabbath when I left home for college. There was no ceremony that accompanied the shift; it was a choice as swift as a pajama-themed party the first Friday night of college and a Monday exam that meant hitting the library on Saturday. There was so much to do that time no longer felt stretchy. It was denim, or leather, or like those American Apparel sweetheart dresses we wore out on weekends, the hours reminding me of their constrictive seams.
I was transported back to those childhood Sabbath afternoons recently, as I read two new books that ask us to question what we do with our time. One was “The Good Enough Job,” by Simone Stolzoff, a journalist and designer; the other was “All the Gold Stars,” by Rainesford Stauffer, also a journalist. Stolzoff’s book considers what our days and weeks might feel like if we didn’t place careers at their center. Stauffer’s probes how we might trade professional ambitions for a different kind of striving — for friendships, communities, even…
