Time is Water

In a western culture that’s obsessed with fast time, quick turnarounds and immediate results, can you and I refuse? Can we slow down?

If time is water then small actions reverberate - sometimes to distances I cannot see, maybe to a generation that I won’t meet.

Angela Davis on cultivating long range imagination: “We wouldn’t be here today had it not been the case that in the 1600s and 1700s there were Black people who believed in the possibility of freedom and we are the beneficiaries of that imagination.”

how shock is shared but nothing is done from it, how time can feel like a rubber band that in moments of tension is stretched out of place and snaps right back to its regular business-as-usual form.

Communal dreaming is not about escapism, nor is it avoidance of the collapsing crises of our lived realities. Dreaming can be found in radical imagination as described by Robin D.G. Kelley in his book Freedom Dreams: “a collective imagination engaged in an actual movement for liberation. It is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and l... See more

I’d like to imagine a space where time is treated like we are gardens rather than machines - where time is attuned to our individual needs and given consistently, given softly, given with care.

I want to imagine with you a timeline where slow time is beautiful. I want a timeline that is blurrier and fuzzier than the linear arrow of time that I’ve been taught is the best and only way.

It is in our best interest to question the metronome of capitalism and the ways it arranges time, both structurally and interpersonally. It’s in our best interest to study the alternative clocks that exist. It’s in our best interest to offer curiosity around ways we can construct our own clocks.

In a still-raging pandemic and cascade of atrocities, there’s a governmental and cultural push to rush through grief, to get back to business and move on. A cultural “correction” of time, to get back on the “right track.”