About Time

Is it true that we are just killing time until it kills us?

What even is time? Einstein taught us that it truly IS completely relative. But we knew that! Those ten minutes in which you are getting your teeth drilled last a great deal longer than the ten minutes in your bath. Time is weird. Time is also culturally defined.

Africans have a very different take on time then we Europeans do, and I have to admit that I often like their view better than ours. Time is not money in Africa (except maybe in the board rooms of Nairobi, Johannesburg or Abidjan). Time was nothing at all to the Ghanaians I met fifty years ago. We were all just swimming around in it, just like the air we breathed.

I remember clearly as a young girl my shock when a grown man got up from talking to me and walked away as he said, ‘I am coming. I am coming. Wait small’. I was mad and wanted to scream at him. Why should I ‘wait small’? One thing I never wanted to do was to spend my life waiting for time to pass. Ironically somehow, it seems that those less time driven cultures actually spend less time just waiting then do we clock bound folks.

In 2006 in Nairobi, I once got to a wedding 7 minutes after the time stated on the invitation – we had been stuck in traffic. When we walked into the church, they were sweeping the floor and we asked if we had missed the ceremony. (For our marriage bacj in Sudbury, Mass our church had done 7 weddings in one day so we could easily have missed our own ceremony if we had been late) The Nairobi cleaners laughed and said that No we were not at all late, but they wouldn’t explain further. We were the only people in the church then, for two solid hours after they swept. Somehow everybody else knew to meander in really late, and the bride showed up three hours after the invitation stated, along with the vast majority of the guests.

To this day I tell people in Kenya that if you want to make an American mad, just keep her waiting. I slowly bubble up into raging fury as I calculate how much your tardiness is costing me. It feels terribly rude to me as a time-centric American, it feels like you don’t take my time as having any value. But for us of course – time is money. I personally am always thinking of ways I can do two things at once to save time, or at least how I can be more efficient with my limited time. This stresses my out – and I’m sure ages me prematurely. But presumably it saves me money somehow.

In the Ghana of my youth babies were named for the days of the week that they were born on, so calendars at least had meaning. But one day’s hours of sunlight was perhaps the smallest unit of time they were willing to work with….’I’ll see you tomorrow’ was perfectly reasonable; but certainly not ‘at 12:30’!

Then in Dar-es-Salaam, in 1976, I learned to tell time in Swahili: their language systematically counts their hours from sunrise to sunset and then back again. Sunrise is an exciting, significant daily event. Every morning the dark night cracks wide upon, accompanied by exuberant birdsong, into a fiercely bright day potentially full of enthusiasm and pleasure.

In our faculty home on the campus of the University of Dar-es-Salaam we didn’t even have ‘proper’ walls. We had levered shutters that you left open all night so that you could enjoy the breeze until the sun woke you at 6 am every morning all year, and you quickly shuttered up through the heat of the day. The sunrise on the equator is a majestic and magnificent occasion that lasts about 5 minutes. It’s as if the blackness of night is pierced like a balloon and shoots away up into the heavens.

According to my memory, the Tanzanians jump up with the sun so that by moja (one o’clock in the morning, which equals our 7 am) you have already got up, eaten, showered, dressed, packed your bag for the day and are already at school. By sita (six o’clock or noon for us) you were hungry for lunch; it all made sense. Then night started all over again, moja usiku ‘one at night’ is 7 pm, time to rest in the dark (from pre-electricity days) and probably play some music or tell stories to your family. Of course, now one just watches TV.

This powerful geographic difference probably explains a lot of the cultural difference in time between Europe and Africa: In the frozen north summer days are very different from winter days, you drag yourself up amidst the mist and cold mornings and struggle out from your covers to seek the warming sun. On June 2ist here in Paris the sun shines until 11 pm. Whereas as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight”. This is not the case in the tropics!  

Of course, European Americans took their old country’s culture to the new world with them, and it meshed well with capitalism. One sells 8 hours a day of her time to her boss in exchange for her salary. I have no idea how the first nations of the Americas dealt with time (though I heard a rumor once that the Navajo used to have no word for “plan” – so maybe Joseph, and his coat of many colors, never warned their king of ‘seven years of feast followed by seven years of famine’). Being in tune with nature means no planning, no hoarding or ‘saving’, and thus hunger can come before the harvest, unless you can live off the hunting. On that note, those lucky Africans can harvest all year around, so they don’t need to go into starvation mode in the winter, like my European ancestors did, even if they haven’t filled their root cellar.

As a good capitalist American student, I learned to be on time as I grew up – first to school and then to work: ‘time is money’ after all.  The first clock was put up in Paris in 1370 (meaning one thousand, three hundred and seventy years after Jesus was born). REALLY? Europeans knew that. I’m skeptical. After all Methuselah may not really have lived 900 years, I question that too. In fact, I blame the Romans with their Gregorian then Julian calendars – they were good counters after all. I’ve heard that until they figured out the leap year concept the Romans were getting well out of sync between their seasonal holidays and the seasons in which they actually fell. Imagine the Easter Bunny in the scorching heat (oh wait that may be coming around again now with our climate change)

As Europe ‘developed’ you had to know when to be where with more precision than our seasonally defined agrarian roots had needed. The saints’ days had always been important in medieval Europe because they told you when to plant and sow, harvest and store; but not when to show up at court to see the king.

In fact, it once came to my attention that timed football games were originally established near factories not just to entertain the workers but also so that these same workers could get more of a sense of time as well. They were supposed to develop a sense of 90 minutes by knowing how long a game lasted.

That’s a good idea, maybe if I played soccer, I would have a better sense of time myself. I really can’t relate time without a clock. I must always have a time piece near me. Of course, we now have smart phones to help with that.

There was a clock on the wall, once in 1985, when my graduate class, at an expensive Ivy league University, got mad at our professor for being ten minutes late to our class. To our credit – it was criminal how much we were paying per class hour each term. We had done the math, and we didn’t want him shortchanging us. I’m sure the professor wanted to stay late but we all had jobs to get to so we couldn’t wait around.

I sometimes think that I have been using time as a form of self-punishment my whole life. Certainly, the almighty schedule has run my life for most of my years. We are all slaves to Tax Day, to our boss, to our self-imposed New Year’s Resolutions with deadlines, and even to the crockpot waiting for us back at home. I know, I am always putting a deadline (even that name is horrible when you stop time long enough to notice) on my projects: ‘I will loose five pounds by my birthday’; ‘I will write to my mother on Saturday’; ‘I will jog four times a week’. These are all time-based pressure points, and now as I look down the pike at old age (predictably today, because it is my 63rd birthday) I wonder if this time obsession is still serving me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to flow with the seasons of the earth and with our bodily needs? A girl can dream anyway: To get up when you are rested, hopefully with the sun. To eat when you are hungry; breakfast is to break the fast after all, though the French don’t dejeuner (or ‘unfast’) until noon; they eat dinner late after all. We could hunker down for a long winter’s nap with our cupboards full of food in the dark cold months and work really hard for planting and harvest in the long spring days and cooling fall season. As we age, we could work fewer hours at the office, but presumably get lots done because we know the ropes. Or we could live on less income because our homes are paid off and we eat less. Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely?

But obviously with 8 billion souls on the planet right now – we no longer have the luxury of this ease with lower productivity. Some of us used to be less concerned with efficiency, but now capitalism has us in a frenzy in which there is never enough time to do what we need, let alone want to do.

I heard a story once of how the European Carolinians (white people from N and S Carolina) were considered lazy by the capitalist powers that were setting society’s norms in the 17^th century. I guess they didn’t want the capitalist hassle of buying slaves. They just wanted to relax and do their family farming peacefully without owing anybody anything. ‘No no’ it was argued ‘you need slaves to grow cotton to sell to England to get rich so you can relax on your plantation’. Capitalism has always been greedy. Under it’s yoke – If a subsistence farmer is not greedy he is lazy of course.

Now, there is the more recent story of a rich Californian who visited a poor Mexican fisherman in Baja-California. The fisherman got up early and went out to catch what his family needed for the day, he even got some extra fish to trade with his neighbors for corn and schooling for his kids. But he was home and sleeping under his sombrero by 2 pm when the millionaire came up and wanted a fishing expedition. The fisherman said no, and the Californian pushed back by calling him lazy. “Why don’t you catch more fish and sell them in the market and get rich?”

“No quiero” replied the fisherman “What good would all that money do me?”

“Well you could obviously buy more boats and hire helpers and get richer and richer”

“But por qué I’m fine”

“ But then you could let the others work and you could relax” the millionaire explained.

“I’m relaxing now” replied the fisherman.

It seems to me that we westerners think poor people shouldn’t be allowed to relax; one ought to be worried about his lack of saving’s account. We must always want more than we have. Capitalism only really works well if we are all hungry for more.  If you don’t have a huge savings account, you haven’t earned relaxation – according to the capitalist machine. And yet I want to just relax for the next 20 years even though I don’t own a car and I can’t afford a fancy cruise and I may not be able to eat out much as an old lady.

My father died when he was 41 years old, I would like to make it to twice his age before I leave this realm, but there is no assurance of that, so I am getting a bit protective of my time and health. I will not sacrifice the latter for the former!

Is time really money, or is time all we have? When you die you will leave your money behind, but you will not leave any time behind. You will have spent it all. Our lives are no more than the sum of our days.

As the Irish say, “we aren’t here for a long time, lets at least make it a good time.”