I’ve been meaning to reflect on the way that time moves at a snail’s pace elsewhere. It’s go, go, go here in the States, of course, especially on the East Coast. But when I’m travelling (and the luxury of travel only extends my conceptions of time), time seems to unfurl itself leisurely–no hurry, no rush. Time becomes an abstraction, something you’re not trying to wrangle into a solid shape but something more organic, something you feel in your bones and stop worrying about, as if seconds were grains of rice.
One of my favorite memories of Togo was a morning I spent on a farm with Kosi’s children. Here’s the three of them below.
Morning with Kosi's children on the farm
Little did we worry about when lunch would be ready, or how we would prevent ourselves from boredom (we didn’t speak the same language), or what other people were doing. There’s no one else around! There’s no place to be! There’s nothing that I’m missing out on!
I’m back in the rat race, and though I don’t have as much work as I will a week from now (it’s still the beginning of the semester and my students haven’t turned in essays yet), I’m feeling stressed. I have to clean my house, pay my mortgage and car payments, walk Lucy, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Never seems to end.
I miss the luxury and freedom of living by the light of day, the seasons, the earth.
