"Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out."

To be responsive to the vulnerability of living beings and living systems is to become exposed to responsibility, and to the possibility of intense suffering as well as to the possibilities of serenity, joy and belonging... The seduction of comfort, if such there be, lies squarely here in a desire to avoid suffering. As self and place are interwoven for most of us, self-protection would require insulation from other living beings and from place itself. Self-protection would thus promote the fragmentations of modernity and while insulating us, would also leave us stranded in a hapless nowhere.