One thing that fascinated me about living in Winnipeg last week was the sense that time itself had expanded, slightly. It wasn’t that we were on vacation or that there was no sense of urgency – work and urgency are continuous sources of stress on the nature of time in New York City. It was a palpable sense that time was alive in the place.
What I found in Winnipeg was that people live in time very differently. One friend works 2 days per week and spends the other three taking care of her two older kids and reads and works in the community. Another works 6 hour days while another took six months off to catch up on baseball and books. It’s not that these folks are unambitious, disinterested or slothful. In fact, it could be argued that their drive is governed by a different set of criteria which I don’t know or understand because I don’t own that set myself.
While in NYC, one is constantly working to catch up to where one was yesterday, it felt that, in Winnipeg, one worked to earn money to live well, which most people there do. The restaurants are by and large excellent, beautiful homes can be had for 1/3 the price of other cities, and events are very often free. It could be argued that this pleasuring of time is the Canadian Government’s fault. By ensuring that all of its citizens have health insurance, people are not governed by survival alone as many people in the U.S. are; their family will be well-cared for by a doctor no matter what — job or no job, career or temporary, sick or healthy.
I’ve always felt that this was the hidden benefit of government-provided health insurance and I was proven correct last week. That benefit is freedom.