The last month has been marked by the inevitable round-robin letters and emails, and while I dearly love the people who send them, they would never win any awards for originality.
Each year, without fail, many of these letters start off with words like this: “We can hardly believe that another year has flown by”. Or “It only seems like yesterday that we were writing last year’s greetings”. People look back over another year, wondering where the time has gone. We seem to live in a culture that constantly feels pressurised by time – deadlines that have to be met, an awareness that the clock is always ticking. If we say that a person has “time on their hands”, we have come to equate that with laziness.
The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, a man who has amassed billions in personal wealth was once asked what one thing he would wish for in life. He reportedly replied, “More time”. That’s one thing in life that not even the wealthiest person can change. It’s ironic that in a culture so committed to saving time, that is the one thing we feel increasingly deprived of. We talk euphemistically about “saving time”, but in actual fact time can only be spent, not saved.
One of the differences between the African view of time and the Western view is that in Africa people tend to see life as a series of events. When these have happened or been dealt with, then the remainder of the time is for “being”. By contrast, we in the West feel that time has to be constantly managed so that every moment is ‘productive’.
The deficiencies of such a mindset become more apparent to us at times such as the advent of a New Year when we habitually reflect whether the past twelve months have constituted a ‘good’ year, or a ’bad’ one. Even the Queen has been through at least one “annus horribilis”. Such annual reflection reminds us that many of the events of the preceding twelve months were happenings that were outside our ability to manage or anticipate. Royalty is no exception. Equally, we sense that whatever we have written in our diary for 2012 is provisional, as our control over life’s events is so limited.
