A farmer walks into a shop and asks the storeowner, "what's that on your wall."
The storeowner replies back, "it's a clock."
"Oh," says the farmer, "...and what is it for."
"To tell time, it lets you know when to eat or when you are done with work."
The farmer heads back to his home, the farm, and proudly places an artichoke on the wall. He sits back down and after some time, walks up to the artichoke and begins to peel off one of its leaves, while saying to himself, "well, time to eat."
The above dialogue attempts to explain the concept of time among different cultures. In this story, there is a farmer and a city storeowner. These two people are a metaphor for two different cultures, for example, America and Mexico. Western Monochromic Time/M-Time is consistent with Americas/N. Europeans, while Eastern Polychronic Time/P-Time is consistent with Latin America/Middle East. It's amazing that time, the universal concept, can be interpreted so wildly different culture to culture.
In America, time is considered scarce, we are always anticipating running out of it. Our schedules and rigidity within them prove this. While time in other cultures isn't thought of as having the ability to 'run out of' at all, there is less rigidity around the concept of time and more involvement with the relationship of it.
In Mexico, generally speaking, there may be no "time is up" thought but rather "time to move on" after whatever is happening currently whether that be a conversation, work project, etc. is completed. Another example is conversation- as in many (perhaps most) other cultures it is not something that is hurried due to time constraints (that are mostly purposeless), but enjoyed and apart of the day, again-not deliberately placed into a non-justifiable timeframe.
Perhaps, more or less, Americans are more worried about getting as many things done as possible rather than enjoying one thing at a time. Maybe, our (Americans) time is skewed...
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