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.”

Time spent outside of productivity is cast as wasted or squandered.

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

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.

There’s a history to capitalism colonizing time and fixing it to its own metronome.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking about the ways that capitalism organizes time. Notice its undercurrents in language: “How are you spending your time?” “Don’t waste your time.” “Let’s save time and go this way.”

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.”