Friday 16 December 2016

Who said time is counted?

In 2008, Luke Pritchard from The Kooks was "wishing, hoping [he] can write [an imaginary girl] a rhyme, that might stop the tick of time". 

I used to be mystified by his words.
What is time? What makes it tick? Can it be stopped? Even so, for which reasons?
The more I think about it, the more I realise that, more than money, Time is the only real currency we have in this life.


Toilet roll of money



Cash play


Money gets devalued, inflated, deflated. It is just created and destroyed in a series of algorithms that anyone can play around with. The recession of 2008 very much stems from this number game: lower interest rates, alter Consummer Price Index, hike oil prices conveniently, cut down production costs... Our economies are all about juggling figures, trends, data and other man-made business tools. All costs are temporary and artificially made, but some things are free and naturally remain.

I often wonder at the life of my own electrical devices.
I bought a phone back in 2014, barely used it, barely had it out of my bag, barely exposed it to any sort of "hazards" (water, heat, fire, fidgety hands, etc.), barely charging it at all. But 2 years later on, it is giving me the itch. Its screen freezes as soon as my finger touches it, its battery sinks without warning, and suddenly it can't seem to find the network that was here two days before. What is this magic? It's time to change my phone, I'm led to believe. TIME.


Downward spiral clocks

Spending time

Has time even got anything to do with it? Afterall, there is no major difference between yesterday and today. I still get my alarm to ring, I still go to work, use my wristwatch to double check the time, because I don't trust my phone anymore. I've seen it stuck on 3.50pm so many times, when the correct digits should have been 5.43pm or even 8.21pm.
So that could be the measure of time. The differential between what I believed some time ago (that my phone was a spot-on accurate clock) and what I think now (that my phone is reaching the end of its manufactured life).

Similarly, Time is precious because it is the measure of our growth and emancipation from our old selves to our current selves. What I was when I lived on these other continents 5, 10, 20 years ago, and what I am now (or what I have become) have a lifetime stuck in-between. The structurally adjusted economies, the Schengen area, the live massacre at the Twin Towers, the Great Financial Crisis, Obama's presidency, etc., these events chunk out what is a past that I wouldn't (and couldn't for the life of me!) remember otherwise.

But Time is also precious because my use of my time defines who I am. Do I mainly sit behind my computer? Do I take action to plan for my wishful future? Should I hang out longer at this party or is it better to go for a walk by the ocean? Am I going to order a take-away or try out this recipe in my new cooking book? Decisions are made with time in mind.


Correct sitting position for western style toilets


Catching up

But when you have been across many places and you have experienced many people's ways of life, thoughts, problems, customs and cultures, it makes it even more confusing to get a sense of time. Sure, it takes me one minute to boil water for my tea in my kettle, but if I were in xxx I would have to get the wood going and the fire burning before I can even put the water pot on top. Yes, talking to my friends is easy: I just log on to Whatsapp and drop them a message and catch them online. But suppose I lived in xxx, no way I could do that without walking to an internet cafe and paying a fee for a log-in. Getting that holiday house in xxx would be so quick: I pay cash and get the papers straight on, while here I need to open a loan account, show my payslips/bills/account statements, etc.

I've come to the conclusion that time only has the value we stick on it. If I'm willing to take the time to discuss with you, you mean a lot to me. If I'm spending time thinking a problem through, its solution is important to me. If I'm happy to use 57 minutes and 23 seconds to type and illustrate this post, then, yes, writing this blog brings value to my life.


And if you are reading this, then, somehow, we are sharing the same views on life, across the time-space continuum.


Tuesday 13 December 2016

How it begins...



Why blog?

It starts with an inner debate:
What more can be said? What value can be added? 
AGAINST
Why keep your thoughts locked in? Why not speak them up?



Quiet zone

I'm pretty sure that if you meet any hard-core blogger in real-life, you will probably not be impressed one bit. They tend to be invisible. They don't say much, they sponge everything in. They won't answer back, they will run their musings through their brains. 

The thing is, for some people, it is much easier to write rather than speak. Often, the world is such a deafening mess that you only have two choices:
1. tune in and join the crew
2. tune out and dissent

Choice N.2 is by far the hardest life choice, because, let's be honest, who can realistically live in this world while not being part of it? That's clearly a recipe for Dr Jekyllism and Mr Hydism, or addiction, or escapism...



Dilemma

21st century offers myriads of ways to escape this post-(apocalyptic)September 11th World. Youtube, Google, Wikipedia, Snapchat, Instagram, etc... That must be the new generation's way of running their quiet rebellion. Teenagers used to run away from home (some still do, but don't last long out there), nowadays they just pull out their phones or tablets or whatever gets them connected to whoever (really, no one has the time to care, not even them).



Typing machine

 

When I think about my generation, our way to tune out was just to run our imagination 
wild with ambition and start crazy (often short-lived) projects. Because our textbook-based studies were a thoroughly mind-dumbing experience completely cut out from our technological and imaginary whims (anime, chatrooms, fanfictions, RPG, webpages, conventions, forums, computer games, etc.), we compensated by binge-computing during weekends from dawn until... well the next dawn.

Later on, when we started to earn a little bit of money (too little, given our drive and hard work), we discovered that the real world, just like the internet, was very much an open space. It became our playground. A weekend in Amsterdam, two days in London, a holiday in Portugal, four weeks in Berlin, an Erasmus exchange in Spain, a gap year in Rome...Any place, any time at any moment. No wonder the low-cost airlines racked so much money in those days. We literally force fed them with our green and yellow euros notes. All the time.





Growing up

Surely, you don't run a travelathon around the world without getting stained in the process. It would be like asking to dance in the rain without getting drenched one bit. So we got properly splashed in and out by the ways of this world. The people, the languages, the customs, the weathers, the accents, the breaking news, the films, the wars, the musics, the epidemics, the currencies, the animals, the landscapes, the politics, the carbon footprints, the slums, etc. Nothing spared us. We took the full blow of it. "I'm getting some experience." most of us would think, convinced that this would make a difference on our CVs and help us bag these jobs that kept evading us.

The reverse happened. We got high on those experiences and forgot about getting jobs. Who wants to get locked in a cubicle in his/her hometown when you can jump the border and meet new people and put together a master plan on how you are going to change the world? Forget about working for money and buying a house: the world is my playground, and it's a million times the size of my parents' block (oceans included of course. We all need swimming pools, don't we?).



World network
 
And now, technologies are backing us up. You want to travel to Kashmir? Well, Google Earth will tell you exactly on which side of the mountain your B&B is hanging. That retreat in Bali? You can book it on Expedia.com. You need to talk to your grandparents  back in your Peruvian village? Skype and Whatsapp are the way forward. You dream of getting those antiques Russian Babushkas for your sister? Etsy has it all custom-made for you, and Paypal will take care of the banking hassle. 





Crossovers

So really, who wants to be sedentary in this world of spiritual and physical nomadism? Who can swear they are unshakably deep-rooted when their leaves are constantly reaching out for every new sunrise out there? Who can still say I'm "pure", "100%", "authentically" [insert any nationality here]? 

It doesn't mean that we don't have any culture or any values or any traditions. Quite the opposite, we have too many of them, and they are the new cultural (if not genetic) make-up of our personalities.


I called this blog "Transcultural Mayhems" to talk about my (and other people's) experiences of getting sucked into this wonderful (but, at times, dizzying) whirlpool called Multiculturalism.