"Time" | with Tim Vogt

How do you want to spend your time? How does the way you spend your time impact others? When is time with others “wasted”?

Listen to hear Tim Vogt discuss how time spent with people with disabilities should be valued as “sacred.”

“Time matters so much… We have come to understand that the time we have with people with disabilities is sacred. It represents their life.”

Full Transcript:

Katie: So, what does it mean to spend a lifetime with people?

Tim: There’s a great metaphor from C.S. Lewis in his book “The Four Loves,” where he talks about the difference between approach and nearness, and he talks about this in the context of faith and being close to God. But I think it applies, the way he describes it he says,

“I want you to imagine that you’re on a path, and your path ends at a village, and the village has a warm bath and a cup of tea and all your friends are there, and there is a fire and you’re in the mountains and you’re on this path and it’s cold and it’s rainy and your coming to this cliff, and you’re at the top of the cliff, and below you you can see the village where you are going, the baths and the tea and the friends. It’s waiting for you. But there is no way to get to it, you’re near it, you can see it, you can smell the smoke from the fire. But you can’t fly and you can’t climb down the cliff. The only way to get there is a five-mile loop that goes around the whole valley, and actually every step you take for a while is going to get you further from the village, but interestingly enough you’re approaching your goal more than you were when you were near it.”

The question really is about what’s the goal. And what it means to get there. When I think about what does it mean, especially in our work in Starfire, to help people grow towards each other, it means more than just being near. The path is actually the thing we have to keep going along. We have to travel that. And time matters there it might take longer, it will take longer. We can’t actually get closer unless we spend a lot of time together. Isn’t that a great metaphor?

K: It is.

T: Its really helpful to me

K: Yeah. Why do people have a hard time committing to a long-haul?

T: Well I’m really interested these days in what happens if we don’t have to commit to it but we just continue travel together. Because, time is just really interested in that, if we go 30 years in the future, and we say we’ve been best friends, or we’ve been married, or we’ve been great neighbors. We’d look back and say, what kinds of things did we do to keep that alive. It was things like forgive each other, and grow separately but come back together, and bring new people in to introduce and celebrate together. We’d have to do all these things that probably require us to be uncomfortable. But when we are in the future looking back, its easy to say: “Oh yeah that’s how it happened,” but it’s hard for us to see it that way. That’s why time matters so much, is that it’s the passing of time that allows all of that stuff to happen.

K: Sometimes more time does not equal quality time. So with Starfire we have actually started working less with people, we spend less time with people. And we out in more quality during the week more than maybe we did with the day program days.

T: It was just a way we thought about peoples lives and our purpose. Our whole purpose was to almost fill time, and now it is to invest it in that future story, that future goal. We have just come to understand that the time that we have with people with disabilities is sacred. It represents their life. And we spend a few hours a week building that life. A connected, vibrant, life with lots of friends who care about me.

K: So you’re saying that the goal you have in mind can determine the way you spend your time. And the goal that we have is different than keeping people safe and happy now it’s a full rich life.

T: Yeah, its some what of an understanding, and it’s something to own up to. We didn’t actually imagine the same kind of lives for people with disabilities than that we imagined for ourselves. And somehow we imagined that their purpose was a very finite, you know, existence. That was very much in the present of managing them or just keeping them safe and happy. When we started to say “oh we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. Each of these people have a unique purpose.” Then we had to, one come to terms how we assumed very little was possible for them. And once when we did that, we had to commit ourselves to what was possible. Then we had to understand that’s generally looks like a connected, included, participatory future. But, again its unique and wild for each person. So we had to design our services in a way that use time to get there. When we started to think about what that looks like, it takes a lifetime to build a life so we had to figure out how to invest our time and partnership with people in a sacred way that lead to that future. And allow the space for surprise and new relationships and affection to percolate.

K: So that’s that three hours that we spend a week instead of the four days.

T: Yup. So instead of four days its three hours of invested time, and the week in between actually really matters, because we become new over that week and the story becomes a little deeper. Week by week it gets deeper and deeper. Its approaches that vision of the future. It approaches that forty to fifty-year story. You can only chip away at that a step at a time, or a day at a time week at a time, you can’t knock it all out in a week or a month. It just doesn’t work like that.