lessons from time travel 007
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last week my wife and i celebrated our second wedding anniversary. i sent her a loving message from the future, while i was six hours ahead in amsterdam. anniversaries and birthdays bring with them the reminder of the passing time that is often accompanied by fear or anxiety. there are so many things we’ve yet to do together, and so many things i want to get right in our time on this earth. western constructions of time teach us to want and to yearn for more time, and that the best is always yet to come.
while i was traveling, i came across the concept of sasa and zamani time dimensions that exist in many african societies. i’m very early in my explorations, but the basic concept is this idea of the sasa (the ‘now-period’) that is the creation and experience of time that then flows into the zamani (the past). so the idea of a grand a far far away future does not exist — time must be produced. it’s a relationship to time that i struggle to wrap my head around in my limited perspective.
i’d like to learn more about alternative ways of relating to time in more depth, and begin to make shifts toward embodying that knowledge within a capitalistic society. for now i take with me the lesson in making the time that is needed to experience love, joy, and life. when that anxiety of the ticking clock arises while spending a sunday making a bouquet of flowers, taking a morning stroll, or celebrating the close of another year — i want to settle into the moment knowing that this is the zamani that i will look forward to remembering.
CITATIONS
john mbuti, African Religions and Philosophy (1990) h/t @mumbipoetry.
»each african people has its own history. this history move ‘backward’ from the sasa period to the zamani, from the moment of intense experience to the period beyond which nothing can go. in traditional african thought, there is no concept of history moving ‘forward’ towards a future climax, or towards an end of the world. since the future does not exist beyond a few months, the future cannot be expected to usher in a golden age, or a radically different state of affairs from what is in the sasa and zamani…so african peoples have no ‘belief in progress’, the idea that the development human activities and achievements move from a low to a higher degree…the centre of gravity for human thought and activities is the zamani peiod, towards which the sasa moves. people set their eyes on the zamani, since for them there is no ‘world to come’…«