Time

Some images evoke emotions that bring inner peace. I just walked past a photo of oak leaves scattered over a snow-covered forest floor. The singular beauty of the white blanket highlighted by remnants of a past season. This harmony is what I often seek, a feeling of fulfillment; nothing lacking.
Life can be full of such moments, be they images or interactions. Life is also full of opposite experiences, feelings of longing, frustration, and incompleteness. Yet, what is life if not the ebb and flow of the tide...
What a week can bring to your senses. I am humbled by the privilege of having this experience in Senegal. An opportunity to stop, smell the flower, and savor its beauty in that moment and later on. What I lack in the U.S. in time, I am finding here in Senegal. Yet time is not all we need, we also need experiences to make the time rich. Some of those experiences are in the company of others, while others are defined by solitude. To choose to be alone with my own thoughts now appears to have been a rare luxury in the U.S.; here it can be a daily, cherished reality. Let me quote some lines from a vignette that I recently read from an anthology entitled, Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America, edited by Marian Wright Edelman. The book is my current nightstand occupant, and the piece is called Summer Coming by Anna Quindlen.
“Summer is coming soon. I can feel it in the softening of the air...Open windows. Day trips to the beach. Pickup games. Hanging out.
How boring it was.
Of course, it was the making of me, as a human being and a writer. Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry or compose music or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
And that, to me, is one of the saddest things about the lives of American children today. Soccer leagues, acting classes, tutors--Our children are as overscheduled as we are, and that is saying something.
This has become so bad that parents have arranged to schedule times for unscheduled time.
...There is ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call “doing nothing” is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by scheduling.
Perhaps it is not too late for American kids to be given the gift of enforced boredom for at least a week or two, staring into space, bored out of their gourds, exploring the inside of their own heads. “To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do,” said Victor Hugo. “Go outside and play,” said Prudence Quindlen. Both of them were right.”
I am happy to say that Senegal is helping me be that kid of a lost era in the U.S. May we all as adults make a conscious effort to carve out “nothing time.” It is making me the person I am becoming, and I am ever so grateful.