Time is Water

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

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

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.”

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

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.”

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.

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