The value of time

My sister has been living in Barcelona, Spain, for the past four years, she was getting her degree in Visual Communication. So this holiday my family and I went to her graduation ceremony. To my surprise the ceremony was not the usual enduring lament of melancholic student, it was fast and direct, straight to the point. There were no three hour speeches, no personal stage photographs, no jugging with professors, no internal jokes, nothing of that sort. Just a hasty name-calling-paper-giving act.

At first I thought these people were really beyond our traditions, they respected time in a way we could never understand. We are a three-hours-a-day-traffic tolerant culture. We mock appointments, dates, rendezvous’, and anything which implies meeting with someone at a certain hour. We endure six hours of political nonsense in national television. Just to mention a few situations in which disrespect for time becomes a tradition.

There I was thinking how incredible it felt to witness an express graduation ceremony that allowed both my time and my patience to remain undisturbed, but then it stroke me how impersonal and bitter it felt as they simply called out names and forgot what it actually means to be there: the accomplishment. Being in the last year of college and with my graduation day hopefully approaching I realized, aghast with my contradicting conclusions, that there are certain moment in which time can be spent and wasted free of charge.