1. TIME - for laymen

(c) By Harendra Alwis

Time both as a concept and a construct of the human mind, has gripped our lives with it's many tentacles that run through our minds. A majority of decisions that we make in the course of our daily business is at some level, influenced by time. The only way we seem to be able at least have an illusion of breaking free of the grip of time is to talk about ‘saving’ or ‘managing’ it.

Time saving devices and time management philosophies has taken the fore because we have come to think of ‘Time’ as a limited resource. Therefore as any other resource, we trade time in the open market in many ways and forms. We trade hours that add up to days and in days that add up to years, more often for monetary rewards rather than satisfaction or fulfilment, but overall it is a fair trade.

Time is indeed limited because in the grand scheme of things, a lifetime worth of time is all each of us really have. Whatever we gain or lose in life is a result of how well we trade our time for whatever we think it is worth. In the process, some of us loose time here and there on poor bargains or by spending more time than we can afford on things that don’t add any meaning or purpose to life, and with each second we perceive to have wasted, we worry over the scarcity of time and the acceleration of life.

I was mistaken at first to assume that the industrial revolution which started in the 18th century was responsible for sparking off this rapid acceleration of our lives by forcing us to synchronise ourselves with machines and thus get caught up in a never ending struggle to keep up with them. I was wrong, because the acceleration of life actually started a millennium before the industrial revolution, with the invention of the mechanical clock.

Before the invention of the clock; which is believed to have been in the later years of the 8th Century, civilization kept time with the daily cycle of night and day, the changing faces of the moon and the changing seasons. While the heavens kept time for us, our minds would have been free to gaze at the stars without having to feel guilty about ‘wasting our time’ ‘doing nothing’. But the clock changed our perception of the flow of time from an effortless and unhurried motion of the planets and changes that followed the four seasons, to a quickening, hurrying, intensifying feeling that came with each striking second on the clock-face.

It was only with the invention of the clock that we could accurately account for hours, minutes and seconds and could arrange a meeting at 1700 hours and expect all participants to be there ‘on time’ and also expect to be angry when anyone failed to be there on time. That was when life began to be synchronised with machines. The mechanisation of time is however, a creation of the human intellect and it has almost always been in conflict with our biology.

The human heartbeat is almost always out-of-step with the ticking seconds on the clock. The heart feels and responds to our feelings, beating faster when the body demands and slowing down when we are calm and rested. But the clock ticks on coldly with an even beat and we are reminded that time does not wait for anyone, because it does not know or care for anyone - as life does.

Stories

I woke one morning to an aching world
The sky was empty and the land was bare
Walking on a street that was paved in gold
Was a hungry man, but no one would care
I met a child, who was orphaned and maimed
A generation walked past in gloom and despair
Their hearts and minds by a darkness claimed
Weary with an emptiness they slavishly bear

I wandered to an impassable forest’s edge
Where trees grew dark, without life or light
Where to bring me ‘peace’ as his solemn pledge
A soldier marched in and out of my sight
I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder rest
The voices of history urged me to fight
I looked at their faces and humbly confessed
That I shall only do what I think is right

Every day unfolds a myriad of new stories
To be yelled out loud for everyone to hear
Stories of love, laughter and old memories
And those of courage overcoming mortal fear
Even as I weave a handful of them in verse
In a shared experience that draws us near
At a distant corner, of an unknown universe
A helpless God sheds another silent tear

Seeds

A magic carpet is woven with rays of sunlight,
Moon beams and starlight...
A dream conceived under a clear blue sky,
With the sparkle of an eye...
Bubbles of thought floating in the breeze,
Over the mountains and above the trees...
A drop of freedom trickles down the brow
For the weaver, right now must plough...

Work

Another clear night has ended
Stars swept away by a brighter sun
Another broken heart mended
Sad thoughts and tears undone
Another new day has rendered
Peaceful dreams, a thread of hope spun
Another brave heart has defended
But weaker souls may have been overrun

M(Y) Generation

I belong to Generation Y, as most of you who would read this probably do also. Generation Y is a term – and now a cliché – that has been used in popular American and European literature to loosely describe those who were born in the 80’s and 90’s. I can't be sure whether it is used to describe Sri Lankans, but I use it anyway.

Generation Y in Sri Lanka has grown up in a nation at war. I was only a couple of years old when violence and death became a part of daily life in this land. We belong to a generation that has grown up without a clear memory of a month or even a week in which the blood of a man or woman has not been expended in the name of freedom, independence or national security. An average of seven lives has been lost everyday in our country since 1983 (7.6 lives if you are a statistician, but how can you factor a life?). There are no statistics about how many dreams each of them had or how many tears their loved ones have shed since. Nobody knows how many meals their families had to skip because they had lost the sole bread-winner.

Life in our time has taught us that the way of violence is indeed an acceptable mode of resolving differences among us. So we brawl each other on the roadsides, in classrooms (and in nightclubs or parties if we are unfortunately lucky enough to be able to afford them). Even though a few often gets more publicity when a minister's son is involved, such brawls are – it's fair to assume – a daily occurrence.

But we resort to violence because it helps us escape the fact that we are also helpless and aimless. If violence has not been bred into us, then thousands of us have been snatched away by it, denied of our childhood by the thrust of a gun onto our hands and forced to kill and get killed so that old men could claim the land that is stained with our blood. More than 250,000 under-aged children are estimated to be engaged in armed conflict around the world as I write this (and at least three thousand five hundred to four thousand of them are Sri Lankans – depending on whose estimates you believe and whether it matters to you and how much). Almost all of them will suffer for the rest of their lives as a result of their exposure to violence and the horrific images of war. Countless others – it's odd that I have to use the word "others" to describe our own – have been maimed and orphaned because of war.

Chief among the grandiosities of our inheritance is the notion of a romantic past, a grand history. It shields us sometimes from the insecurities of a misty future. What's more alarming is that it instils in us a false notion that the past is something we have to protect even at the cost of our very lives. It plugs our minds of independent thought and wisdom that would give us the courage to ask simple questions. Who are we fighting for? Who are we fighting against? The man or woman I am about to kill – would we not have married each other if we had not been forced to perpetrate such violence against each other?

We spend anxious hours thinking about a future that is approaching us faster than ever before and leaving us behind even faster. Yet we are told that we are the guardians of the future – a brighter one at that. We are urged to correct the mistakes of past generations and some are confident that we will. Some of our own are confident that our generation can change things for the better. Thomas Jefferson once said, "It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world." We don't have time for Jefferson because we have too many problems to solve and too little time. We imagine for some reason, that we are wiser than the generation that went before us.

The world today is fast-paced than it was yesterday and constantly accelerating. Some of us will keep up, some will fall behind. Some will slow the world down to their pace and others may speed it up even further. It is perhaps a futile exercise to speculate how successful each of us will be in overcoming the challenges of the present – let alone those of the future. Sheer optimism on the other hand, leads many to assume if not blindly hope, that the future generations are capable of solving, and therefore will solve, today's problems.

That is why it is worthy of our contemplation on the other hand, to consider how the violence we helplessly accept in daily life – the violence that has conscripted us, maimed us, orphaned us and made us insensitive to the value and beauty of life and the injustices we take for granted and the inequality they perpetuate as a result, has debilitated our generation. Even the most optimistic among us may find it difficult to deny that the racial and religious bigotry that divided previous generations has extended and spread its poisoned tentacles into ours as well. Each of us needs to take an almost blinding leap of the imagination – one that may even undermine what we think we already know – that would break us free from the dogma and falsities we have inherited. Perhaps justice, peace, prosperity and unity are only the collective effect of each individual's pursuit of truth, and an intellectual bias towards broad understanding instead of narrow judgement.