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.