That's men for you Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: More fathers than mothers, I expect, are in danger of discovering some day that their children have grown up while they were busy at work.
Increasingly, there are women who feel they face the same danger. But the point normally arrives when the woman decides to remain in the home more or less full-time until the children have at least finished primary school. Sometimes, the couple cannot make that choice. Huge mortgages have done a lot to narrow parents' choices.
For the man who is the main earner, it is all too easy to get caught up in the world of work to an extent that leaves no time for children, partner or, even, himself.
Maybe it's time to do something about that.
The United States and Canada are in the middle of a "Take Back Your Time" month. The campaign (www.timeday.org) urges people at work to reclaim at least four periods of time during the month. This is time they will spend with family or engaged in activities for themselves alone - but which takes them out of the workplace.
A key idea behind the campaign is that we make great efforts to maximise what we can get done from nine to five - but we should pay much more attention to what we do between five and nine. That, after all, is the time when involvement with children or other family is most likely to be possible.
Yet some of us have a habit of getting our second wind around seven in the evening and spending that important time at work, performing tasks which could wait until the next day. These thoughts were prompted, not so much by the North American campaign, as by a book by a Swedish physicist, Bodil Jönsson, called Ten thoughts about time - how to make more of the time in your life.
This is not a time-management manual, packed with tips on how to get more out of your day. Such manuals don't always work anyway. A colleague once used a time-management manual, acquired on an expensive course, to prop up his desk so he felt it had not been a complete waste of money.
Jönsson's very readable book is a philosophical reflection on the role that time plays in our lives. She highlights the difference between "clock-time" and "lived-time". Clock-time refers to all that time during which we have one eye on the clock because we're rushing to the next meeting or trying to get a certain number of things done in the day. Lived-time, by contrast, refers to periods when you can be yourself, when you are not trying to meet a deadline, when you are not trying to pack two hours' work into an hour.
Lived-time could be spent having a meal with friends, playing with the kids, going for a walk, reading a novel or talking to your partner.
Jönsson suggests that we need more lived-time, and few of us would disagree. She notices how lived-time is disappearing even out of the lives of children. Many of us can remember long, eternal summers during school holidays. What we are remembering is an experience of lived-time. But today's schoolchildren are so busy rushing from the summer project to the tennis camp to the music camp that they are living in clock-time all summer.
Jönsson encourages us to reflect on the difference between these two kinds of time, on the value of lived-time and on the need to make more room for it.
How are you to do this, you may ask? I don't have a trick to help you to do it and neither does she. But if you make an effort to realise the tyranny which clock-times exercises over us, I think you will come up with ways that suit your needs.
This book was a bestseller when it was first published in Sweden. Its message is just as relevant for the children of the Celtic Tiger and for the men, women and children on whose time the tiger feeds.
pomorain@irish-times.ie
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.