Fascinating article I just found (for the thoughtful blogger who is not passing through at warp speed – LOL.. If you want a compromise cut to the last 4 paragraphs in red):
How We Use Time
The following is an abridgment of Chapter 7 of I’m OK, You’re OK, by Dr. Thomas Harris, M.D.
For most people the pressing question is “How am I going to get through the next hour?” The more structured time is, the less difficult is this problem.[The] programming or structuring [of time] is what people try to achieve, and when they are unable to do it themselves, they look to others to structure time for them.
“Tell me what to do.” “What shall I do next?” “What we need is leadership.”
In our observations of transactions between people, we have been able to establish six types of experience, which are inclusive of all transactions.
They are withdrawal, rituals, activities, pastimes, games, and intimacy.
Withdrawal, although it is not a transaction with another person, can take place, nonetheless, in a social setting. Whenever people withdraw in such a fashion it is always certain that the withdrawal keeps them apart from those they are with bodily. This is fairly harmless unless it happens all the time, or unless your wife [or boss] is talking to you..
A ritual is a socially programmed use of time where everybody agrees to do the same thing. It is safe, there is no commitment to or involvement with another person, the outcome is predictable, and it can be pleasant insofar as you are “in step” or doing the right thing. There are worship rituals, greeting rituals, cocktail party rituals, bedroom rituals. The ritual is designed to get a group of people through the hour without having to get close to anyone. They may, but they don’t have to. There is little commitment, therefore little fulfillment. Rituals, like withdrawal, can keep us apart.
An activity, according to Eric Berne, is a “common, convenient, comfortable, and utilitarian method of structuring time by a project designed to deal with the material of external reality”. Common activities are keeping business appointments, doing the dishes, building a house, writing a book, shoveling snow, etc. These activities, in that they are productive or creative, may be highly satisfying in and of themselves, or they may lead to satisfactions in the future in the nature of stroking for a job well done. But, during the time of the activity, there is no need for intimate involvement with another person. There may be, but there does not have to be. Activities, like withdrawal and rituals, can keep us apart.
Pastimes are a way of passing time. Berne defines a pastime as:
an engagement in which the transactions are straightforward. With happy or well-organized people whose capacity for enjoyment is unimpaired, a social pastime may be indulged in for its own sake and bring its own satisfactions. With others, particularly neurotics, it is just what the name implies, a way of passing (i.e. structuring) the time: until one gets to know people better, until this hour has been sweated out, and on a larger scale, until bed-time, until vacation time, until school starts, until the cure is forthcoming, until some form of charism, rescue, or death arrives, existentially a pastime is a way of warding off guilt, despair, or intimacy, a device provided by nature or culture to ease the quiet desperation. More optimistically, at best it is something enjoyed for its own sake and at least it serves as a means of getting acquainted in the hope of achieving the longed-for intimacy with another human being. In any case, each participant uses it in an opportunistic way to get whatever primary and secondary gains he can from it”.
People who cannot engage in pastimes at will are not socially facile. Pastimes can form the basis for the selection of acquaintances and may lead to friendship and intimacy. As useful as pastimes may be in certain social situations, it is evident that relationships that do not progress beyond them die or, at best exist in quiet desperation and growing boredom. Pastimes, like withdrawal, rituals, and activities, can keep people apart.
Berne devotes a whole book to the subject of games. Most games cause trouble. The word “game” does not necessarily imply fun or even enjoyment.
” A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively it is a recurring set of transactions often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick”. Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective and pastimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but it is not dramatic. Every game, on the hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality”.
Games are a way of using time for people who cannot bear the stroking starvation of withdrawal and yet whose NOT OK position makes the ultimate form of relatedness, intimacy, impossible. Though there is misery, there is something. As the comedian said, “It’s better to have halitosis than no breath at all.” It’s better to be roughed up playing games than to have no relationship at all. What then can we do with time in a way which does not keep us apart?
George Sarton observed: “I believe one can divide men into two principal categories: those who suffer the tormenting desire for unity and those who do not. Between these two kinds an abyss – the “unitary” is the troubled; the other is the peaceful.”
For many thousands of years man?s existence has been structured preponderantly by withdrawal, ritual, pastimes, activities, and games. The majority of men have helplessly accepted these patterns as human nature, the inevitable course of events. There has been a certain peace in this resignation. But the truly troubled people of history have been those who have refused to resign themselves to the inevitability of apartness. The central dynamic of philosophy has been the impulse to connect. The hope has always been there, but it has not overcome the intrinsic fear of being close, of losing oneself in another of partaking in the last of structuring options, intimacy.
A relationship of intimacy between two people rests in an accepting love where defensive time structuring is made unnecessary. Giving and sharing are spontaneous expressions of joy rather than responses to socially programmed rituals. Intimacy is a game-free relationship, since goals are not ulterior. Intimacy is made possible in a situation where the absence of fear makes possible the fullness of perception, where beauty can be seen apart from utility, where possessiveness is made unnecessary by the reality of possession.
Are withdrawal, pastimes, rituals, activities and games always bad. It is safe to say that games nearly always are destructive, inasmuch as their dynamic is ulterior and the ulterior quality is the antithesis of intimacy. Of the others, they are not inherently bad, however, if there is discomfort in a relationship between two people when theses modes of time structuring cease, it is safe to say there is little intimacy.
The question arises: If we strip ourselves of the first five ways of time structuring, do we automatically have intimacy? Or do we have nothing? There seems to be no simple way to define intimacy, yet it is possible to point to those conditions which are most favorable for its appearance such as the absence of games and a commitment to reach out to the vast areas of knowledge about the universe and ourselves, to explore the depths of philosophy and religion, and perhaps find answers, one at a time, to the great perplexity, “What’s the good of it all?”
It was the ’50′s, and I went to school in a different part of town from junior high, in an even bigger newer building. We girls all resembled Olivia Newton-John in Grease. We sat on hard bleachers wearing royal blue uniforms with a big gold bulldog dead center and waved pompoms, having no idea what the plans were out there on the field of dreams. We danced in formal gowns at proms and bent backwards over young men’s arms until our permed hair almost touched the floor. (to be continued)
Deep Thought: Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it “dull” that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn’t seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull? 
rain
Normal
But Wait There’s More
My First Darkroom Photo (of my daughter Jane)I’m taking a Darkroom Photography class to learn how to develop photos. I’ve learned how to transfer my film rolls into a cannister inside a completely pitch black room and then douse it with various chemicals to prepare it develop it. Then I learned how to make a contact sheet. Then I learned how to use an enlarger to make an 8×10 photo and then put it through more chemicals to make the final print. It’s kind of scary and exciting and empowering. I hope to have a darkroom of my own some day.
they could earn elsewhere. It became quite a coveted job and, working alongside them, I could in this way get to know better the handful of popular girls who might smooth my way in the halls of school the following years. My parents also arranged parties in our corn warehouse every Wednesday night where invited youngsters would come to do the bunny hop and play games. There in the dusty wooden rooms we circled and swept each other awkwardly round and round. How they must have loved me then, my parents, to plan and prepare and even mingle with this group of teenaged hormone factories. Their plan worked to some extent and eased my entry into the new school environment. The girls who were given the summer jobs on our farm were some of the most popular girls in school and probably because of this I was invited into certain clubs. 
Just heard this on my computer radio and was reminded how much I loved it in the “good old days.”
