There is a t-shirt design in some of the shops around St. Simons celebrating “Island Time.” It’s popular with tourists who come to the island for vacation. They come to escape their daily grind, and to get away from wherever it is that their grindstones call home. I’m not so sure that locals experience the same concept of Island Time, which may be why they don’t buy the t-shirts.
The assumption is that Island Time means relaxation. It means not having to be anywhere or do anything in particular and leaving our watch behind. Instead we return to our pre-modern instincts and watch the sun to know when it’s time to fold up the beach umbrella and find some fried Wild Georgia shrimp and cold beer. Island Time doesn’t mean that we have all the time in the world so much as it means we don’t care about time. Vacations are for sleeping in and doing what we want to do instead of what we have to do. Living here is like a perpetual vacation, right?
For the locals who survived traffic-geddon earlier this year, we had a test case for measuring a local Island Time. As it turns out, lots of locals do have places to be and aren’t exactly relaxed about sitting in traffic. As a North-ender I can attest to the lack of a “Don’t worry, be happy,” attitude when one sat in the car for two hours to make what was typically a ten-minute commute. If locals experience Island Time, it has its limitations, and at a certain point goes right out the window!
It seems that the summer months offer a universal experience of Island Time though. I don’t care if you’ve had twice as many years without kids at home as you had when they were in school, when Memorial Day rolls around and school lets out, everyone shifts to summer mode. It may be the swarming hordes of short selfish people who crave ice cream and water to splash in, or it may be that impact on the collective mental health of the island when bedtimes and daily routines become less hectic. Whatever it is, summer seems to affect everyone, even those of us who still work for a living.
Summer Island Time happens to coincide with the opening of pools and the rise of the temperature and humidity. Summer hours take effect. Concert series return. It becomes easier to knock off early on Friday afternoons. It may have something to do with the fact that we are less motivated to leave our homes or our cars and the precious air conditioning they offer, or the ironic tendency we also have to lather ourselves in sunscreen and taunt the skin cancer gods. It might be the extra airiness of shorts and flip-flops. Whatever the root cause, there is something to the Island Time phenomenon during the summer, if not at other times of the year.
The summer mentality is a welcome one, because even here in our little slice of paradise, we tend to go hard all the time. People live by their color coordinated Google calendars lest the kids’ sports schedules get too confusing. Even retirees who tend to keep paper diaries are busier than ever. Granted, it’s nothing like what I moved from in the sprawl of Washington DC, but the overscheduled, under-rested lifestyle has found us here, and it’s steadily worsening. Islanders don’t live on Island Time every day, but we yearn for it, nonetheless.
There is an antidote that existed long before Island Time met its first screen print. Some of us would say it was created by God, that it is in fact an essential part of the creation itself. The original Island Time was called Sabbath. Sabbath wasn’t just for resting, but also for worship. Right now there are more people adhering to the worship part of keeping Sabbath than there are keeping the rest part. My hunch is that with less rest, however, the worship will continue to wane too—an occupational worry of mine.
Some of us barely survive until vacation rolls around. We get so few breaks that we relish them and buy t-shirts to commemorate them. That’s not how it is supposed to be. We would benefit from transferring some of our summer mentality to the rest of our life. We’re built for it. Just imagine a regular day of rest when you can say to your calendar and to those who want something from you, “Sorry, I’m on Island Time today.”
