Everywhere is within walking distance... if you have the time.

I don't know if you have seen the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism advertisement regarding time, but it is worth the watch.  Newfoundland has its own time zone, a minimum of a half hour ahead of the rest of Canada.  We are the first to see the sun rise, the first to exercise our right to vote and the first province to start our New Year resolutions (and probably the first to break them).

I am born, raised and worked all my life in Ontario and like most people, I commute.  The time varied depending on the job but it averaged about an hour.  I have gotten used to automatically adding an hour or more to every trip I make to account for accidents, road work and just plain traffic congestion .  This is not a good plan here in Newfoundland.

I find myself sitting outside the hospital where I work at 6:00 am - I start work at 7:00am.  Friends are telling me that we will meet for supper at 6:30pm so when I show up at 5:45pm, I am still early (but not by too much) for the supper they had planned for 6:00pm.

I need to slow down and accept the fact that I can get from one end of St. John's to the other in 15 min...so everywhere I would need to go on a day to day basis does not need an hour buffer.  The whole atmosphere here is different.  In Toronto, it is about what you can accomplish, how many things "got done" today.  Here, it is about the journey, the people you meet along the way and the way you feel at the end of the day...with only a little time added to watch for the moose.

I guess this is what I was looking for... the journey, not the destination.  It is just going to take some time for this 40 year old body to change its ways....