My best days fishing are often those when the beginnings and endings are not in my control. I begin when the sun rises or the sun sets, and I fish until the fish stop biting and go to the deeper, cooler levels of the lake or it gets too dark to see where I am casting. These permeable boundaries are radically different than the rest of my hyper-scheduled, time-managed life: get up at 5:00, make coffee and respond to e-mail. At 6:00, wake up my wife and kids and bring them coffee and tea. 6:15, walk the dog. 6:30, pack school lunches. 7:30, be in my office at my desk. 8:00, prep for lectures. 9:30-10:45, teach, and so on, throughout the day, with time carefully allotted in hour and minute blocks. (I even have an allotted time for napping: between 12:30-1:00 precisely, directly after my 30-minute lunch.) When I am out fishing, on those days when I don’t just have a “two hour allotted fishing time,” segmented time dissolves deliciously into flowing time, where beginning and endings become more flexible.
After suffering through too many endless meetings and dispiriting actions, I’ve come to realize that one of the worst things an activist can do is be too flexible about time. When meetings don’t end on time, or no time is set for their ending, people inevitably start slipping out the back to get on with their lives and in the end, the only people left and making decisions are people who have no other lives to get on to. Hardly the people you want leading the revolution. Actions also need clear beginnings and endings. Again, in order for everyday people to take part in protests, they need to fit it into their everyday schedules, otherwise, it will only be the schedule-less (aka students, bohemians, and trust funders) who will take part. Action endings are also critical. I can not tell you home many protests I’ve witnessed — and how many I helped plan — whose ending was scripted not by the activists ourselves, but instead by the police breaking up the march or hauling away the protestors. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done about this, and sometimes, as with planned Civil Disobedience, this police “ending” is part of our narrative, but usually it’s the result of us just deciding to go on as long as the authorities will let us, which means letting them write the conclusion of our story And, in this ending, they always win.