“Life moves pretty fast,” a hero of mine once said. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It seems that idea is catching on. CNN recently reported on a 72-year-old attorney named Edgar Cahn who, recognizing that time is our most precious commodity, started TimeBanks USA, a non-profit which is based upon a remarkably simple idea. From its website:

Time banking is simply about spending an hour doing something for somebody in your community. That hour goes into the Time Bank as a Time Dollar. Then you have a Time dollar to spend on having someone doing something for you. It’s a simple idea, but it has powerful ripple effects in building community connections.

As the pace of everyday life seems to quicken every year, the so-called “slow movement,” propogated by Cahn and many others, is gaining in popularity. The CNN article cites a number of organizations similar to TimeBanks: the Long Now Foundation, Take Back Your Time, and SlowFood USA, all of which encourage people to view time as their most valuable resource.

Cahn, who came up with the TimeBanks idea in the ’80s after he suffered a stress-induced heart attack, sounds a bit like a disciple of Thoreau, John Muir, and Ed Buryn, among others. Cahn says that the “slow movement” isn’t just about finding a few extra hours or minutes for yourself in an otherwise hectic day. It’s about a fundamental shift in priorities. “The movement is about how we value things other than how fast we can consume and how much we can accumulate.”

Read the whole CNN article here.