What was going on when I was born?

First there were the fitness centers, the aerobic dance classes and racquet ball. Then came the training courses in accounting and financial management, followed by classes in ''country kinds of activities, like hiking.'' They are among many new lunch-hour diversions offered by corporations in Westchester and Fairfield Counties to try to compensate for the isolation some employees feel after leaving New York City for a corporate home in the suburbs. Some companies have even begun paying college professors to give lunch-hour lectures on such weighty topics as psychology in the 80's, contemporary American religion and the emergence of the individual during the Renaissance. And as more and more corporations move to the suburbs, taking their employees with them, they are spawning a small renaissance of their own.

The Washington Redskins employed an awesome combination - muscle and finesse - to win Super Bowl XVII today from the most sophisticated defensive team in football. They beat the Miami Dolphins, 27-17, but the score could not reveal the ways in which the Redskins prevailed. It could not show, for example, how the Redskins' motion nullified the Dolphins' A.J. Duhe, the mobile linebacker who charges from different parts of the field. Nor could the score show how the left side of the Redksins' offensive line charged and punished the right side of the Miami defense, especially when John Riggins was called on to run.

Lawmakers in both major political parties said today that they expected Congress to make major changes in President Reagan's budget to reduce the large deficits that loom for the rest of this decade. Specifically, many members of Congress are advocating much smaller increases in the military budget and cancellation of some expensive weapons systems like the MX missile. There is also a growing consensus that Congress must move more boldly than the President has suggested in raising taxes. ''Who wants to put his name on a $200 billion deficit?'' asked Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, a senior Democrat on the Budget Committee. ''I don't see how anybody, politically, could join up with the President.''

A tumultuous 17-hour Liberal Party meeting ended near dawn yesterday with Raymond B. Harding, the longtime vice chairman and party leader, in control of the party and very likely its patronage recommendations. Governor Cuomo, supported early in his campaign by the Liberals, had held up appointing members of the party until it resolved its differences. But the meeting exposed a bitter division that Mr. Harding said would require a special effort to heal.

Artillery duels between Christian and Druse militiamen spread to Beirut today. In another incident, an Israeli soldier was killed while patrolling the outskirts of the capital. According to an Israeli military spokesman in East Beirut, four or five gunmen opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades on a patrol that consisted of two armored personnel carriers and then escaped into West Beirut behind an Italian contingent of the international peacekeeping force. In addition to the Israeli soldier who was killed, three others were wounded, the Israeli spokesman said. (Secretary of State George P. Shultz said that after a weeklong review of the Middle East situation, the Reagan Administration had no formula to speed a breakthrough in the talks on withdrawing foreign troops in Lebanon. In a news conference en route to Tokyo for the start of a 12-day Asian trip, Mr. Shultz also ruled out applying pressure on Israel to make concessions. Page A6.)

Many bankers have grown fond of playing down size as a measure of a banking company's prowess. Earnings rather than assets, they say, should be the true measure of a bank's stature. ''Our emphasis has always been on profitabilty rather than on asset growth,'' said Tom Jones, chief accounting officer of Citicorp, which emerged as the nation's biggest bank holding company in 1982, displacing the BankAmerica Corporation. But, while all bankers stress earnings, many still think there is some intrinsic value to size as well.

One year ago, when it was announced that British unemployment had surpassed three million, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to struggle to make herself heard over shouts of ''Shame'' and ''Resign'' in the House of Commons. The anniversary passed unremarked this week. The business community's concern focused instead on the current news about the shaky pound and falling oil prices. But Mrs. Thatcher and her Conservative Party must call an election sometime before May 1984, and neither she nor her political opposition is likely to forget that polls consistently conclude that most British voters view unemployment as the single most important indicator of the nation's economic situation.

PASADENA, Calif. THE day of the game dawned bright and clear. That was the biggest upset of all on Super Sunday, even more momentous than the Redskins' beating the odds against the Dolphins. Just when it looked as if the National Football League would have to build an ark, the monsoons held off for a while and the multitude assembled at the Rose Bowl for one of the most exciting games in the 17 Super Bowls.

The government securities market, shaken by the collapse last year of three dealer firms, has changed some of the practices that brought on the failures and is considering other reforms to help prevent future ones. ''It gave our business a black eye,'' the chairman of one firm acknowledged after the collapse last May of Drysdale Government Securities, a small concern that managed to accumulate losses of more than $300 million before they were discovered. The Chase Manhattan Bank, which suffered a $135 million after-tax loss as a result of its dealings with Drysdale, has since charged the firm and its accountants, Arthur Andersen & Company, with misrepresenting its financial condition. And throughout the government securities market, where securities worth billions are routinely bought and sold over the telephone, the Drysdale affair led dealers to look more closly at the creditworthiness of their customers, including other dealers.

17 victory in Super Bowl XVII yesterday, the Redskins' fullback rumbled for a record 166 yards. But he ran away from the Miami Dolphins for the 43-yard touchdown that settled the game. ''I guess a guy fell down,'' he would say later of that run. ''Another guy couldn't quite hold on. That's it.'' That's an oversimplification too. In that fourth-and-one situation at the Dolphins' 43-yard line, the Redskins decided to go for the first down rather than trying for a field goal or punting into the end zone. And the Dolphins knew John Riggins would be carrying the ball. But instead of trying to ram up the middle for a yard or two, John Riggins slanted off left end, broke Don McNeal's tackle and suddenly was in the clear for the touchdown that put the Redskins ahead, 20-17.

Two months before its official publication date, a book maintaining that the late anthropologist Margaret Mead seriously misrepresented the culture and character of Samoa has ignited heated discussion within the behaviorial sciences. The book is ''Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth'' by Derek Freeman, professor emeritus of anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. On the surface, the book - to be published in April by Harvard University Press - is a critical analysis of Miss Mead's ''Coming of Age in Samoa,'' the best-selling work of anthropology, which on its publication in 1928 established her national reputation. ''On that level, Freeman's book is an extremely important piece of work,'' said Robert C. Hunt, chairman of the department of anthropology at Brandeis University, who evaluated the book for Harvard University Press. Beneath the surface, Professor Freeman's book could intensify the often bitterly contested ''nurture versus nature'' controversy, the argument over whether human beings are shaped mainly by environment or by heredity. Moreover, the book raises important questions about scholarship and ideological commitment.

Eight Peruvian journalists were ambushed and killed by a band of Andean peasants who mistook them for leftist guerrillas, the military command announced today. The command said police and army patrols had unearthed the bodies of all eight journalists who were killed last week in the village of Uchuraccay, about 220 miles southeast of Lima. President Fernando Belaunde Terry called for a minute of silence at his weekly news conference today for the slain journalists. He said the peasants apparently thought they were about to be attacked themselves.