Let’s imagine a duration without regular pattern. Nothing in it is recognizable, nothing ever recurs. It is just a duration without measures of any sort, no events – just a void, a timeless chaos. Our actual perception of time depends upon regularly recurring events. Though human desire is in every present instant torn between the desire to stay within known pattern and the desire to escape it.
I find days, weeks, months into years is all nonsense but, we are fixed into them, they define how we live each moment of life? and how we perceive the world. They slice our lives into bits and fragments. Our perception of time depends upon regularly recurring events. Our actual perception of time depends upon these regularly recurring measurements of time.
Imagine living in a world where the only permanent pulse is the sun.
Where “days” go by with no major fluctuations whatsoever and they always look the same. Time experienced as a long sunny duration on a levelled plane without fluctuations. It’s sunny to start early in the morning and it remains that way throughout the day till until late evening. Life and time merged into one long moment until the sun slips over the rim then everything goes dark. And when that darkness finally arrives, it does so for no reason except that light has gone. Sun is the only permanent pulse running by itself here.
The old man sits under the lonesome acacia tree in the Savannah. He does not move.
But we sit in the tension between lived time and that standardized time measured in uniform ticks, a standardized time which moves incessantly toward the future under the banner of progress.
Think instead about the quiet when the sun goes behind the horizon and darkness overtakes the land? The silence of a virgin world sets in, the silence of a world gone to sleep. We lost along the way to register the qualitative difference in the perception of time.
We could draw on so many examples to substantiate our loss. Take for example Jeremiah 29:11 – 12, which talks of God having known us before birth. Man is a materialization of an indefinite process that started elsewhere. That we are in transit, in Swahili we say, tuko njiani.
In Life And A Half, Sony Labou Tansi writes of such a virgin world. This virginity is the source of question to man, a “hollow fullness” in which everything shows you, with an invisible finger, man’s solitude in the infinity of the unconscious. Such a huge hopelessness leads to the act of naming, and makes man the inventor of philosophies to explain the receding void that is eternally present.
But that hollow fullness is ever there, no matter what. Our relation to it is virtual, fictional and non-causal in every sense. As long as there is life, we are in sync with it, and only come off of it when we die.
In Ubuntu philosophy, we say “I am because we are, you are because I am.” You and I are an extension of a one-another-ness, part of a larger whole, a community, a link in the many chains of networks – your life forms the community’s life. We are the nodes, extensions, and time extends them.
Even my own death cannot stop the community’s life. Community life and time will still go on, merged into each other, embedded together. My own death stops nothing. If I die now, at the same instant, many more are born. This is how life and time perpetuate each other in continuity.
Time is each of us, it exists as long as we exist. Imagine it as infinitely expansive. No past, no future. No yesterdays – what we have is an expansive present now.