When I returned to Guyana in 1968, after a gap of some 12 years, I was standing in my aunts’ shop at Hague Front, talking with a rice farmer from Hague Back who had known me from a boy. In the course of a rambling conversation comparing living conditions here and in Toronto, where I was then living, he turned and said, “You know, Mister Dave, de more civilized a man get, de harda he life become.”
I was astounded. This was a man with very little formal education. His world was limited to a small area on the West Coast. He had never been to Berbice, much less abroad. But somehow, merely from observation in his tight circle, he had found for himself this essential truth. All during my stay in Guyana, and for months afterward, and for years since, I’ve never forgotten that observation, partly because of the unexpected source of it, but more for the many demonstrations of it I have seen over the years.
Here recently, in an afternoon chat with the wife of a friend, I innocently asked how her day was going. As if waiting for the question, the lady launched into one of those rhetorical shoot-from-the-hip outbursts. “I had to get up early for a breakfast meeting, then we had a crisis at the office with a customer, which I had to leave to drop my car at the garage for a check. Lunchtime was taken up with another meeting, overseas conference call, taxi to pick up my car, collect my son from school at 3 o’clock. Met the computer guy at home at 4 – that took another hour – then I had to drop a package for my mother-in-law in Eccles. I got back home after 6 feeling like I had been through the wringer. What’s going on?”
It’s a familiar story – we all have our own version of it – because it is simply a delineation of what modern life has become. Without debating the merits, one way or the other, one of the principal losses I see in life today is simply the absence of repose. The degree of it is not as severe as elsewhere, but the condition is here, as well.
Compared to when I was growing up on the West Coast, there is very little time left to mankind these days to just switch off the production engine and, as the cliché says, watch the grass grow. The blank spaces in our days when we would indulge in contemplation, or simply wonderment, are few and far between. Modern psychologists are advising us to consciously structure those moments; to put them on our “to do today” computer check list, in fact. We are simply not getting enough repose.
I remember lying on my back as a youngster in Vreed-en-Hoop looking at the sky and contemplating the enormity of the universe, the distances involved, the idea that this enormous earth I was lying on was actually floating in space with the seas somehow held on to the orb. It could be a terrifying examination, and indeed there were times I would deliberately discontinue it – the mathematics alone could cause brain lock – but the point here is that in that time there was time for such dalliance. There was time to be still and simply listen to your thoughts. Life today, affords us less and less time for such reflections.
To dwell on a line of poetry, to consider what ramifications lie there, we don’t have time for that. Original expression has gone by the board; now we parrot these mindless catch phrases (the latest one is “back in the day”) and latch onto the latest slogan.
In music, the awaiting of the clever outcome of the double entendre calypso, such as “Honeymooning Couple”, is something we don’t have time for any more. Attention spans in entertainment, as in everywhere else, have been shortened. Give me the completed message now, immediately, in 6 words or so, WHO LET THE DOGS OUT, and let me ride on that for 2 minutes 30 seconds (the average time of a hit song), and give me another 6-word message for another 2:30, and so on. No ramifications; no possibilities to evaluate; no new thoughts to consider; no nuances; straight from the shoulder – “Who Let the Dogs Out”. Game over.
On television we have become slaves to the speeding clock. Every subject – from climate change to the economics of Africa – must be introduced, discussed and conclusions reached in 5 minutes. The classic television summation, we have heard so often in such discussions, comes as the time runs out: “Sorry, we will have to leave it there.” Often one is propelled to ask, “Leave it where? Up in the air like that?”
Life has simply become speeded up so that we are going faster, and longer, but we have less and less time to contemplate or speculate or consider. Being on the go more, means we have less time for repose; for listening to a symphony; for sitting on the bank of a river, or for watching the sun go down.
Time was people would sit on the verandah, chatting through the mosquitoes for hours, dealing with whatever subject came to mind. It was in such conversations that we got to know the ins and outs of each other; in those wandering gaffs long-held fears or proud moments were revealed as they could never be in transitory conversations. Now, more often than not, those encounters are brief and superficial – something we conduct in a brief encounter on the way to somewhere else for another brief encounter.
In the nuts and bolts of living we now have more labour-saving machines so we should, theoretically, have more leisure time. Of course, what happens is that with the array of potential diversions we now have, we inevitably end up occupying that new leisure time with some new diversion.
In my youth, undoubtedly, part of my scenario was that I was short on distractions. I had no computer calling me, no video game, no internet exploration, never mind cell phone, IPod, etc. And yes, compared to what’s before us now, it was less exciting, even less stimulating, but, by the same token, what we are dealing with now is a stress engine that leaves many of us depleted, like my friend’s wife, or having to rely on opiates to cope with the moraine of modern life.
Perhaps my own need for quiet creative hours is colouring my position, but every time I encounter the people who are still somehow getting time to contemplate (either consciously or through sheer circumstance) there is a clarity or a balance in those individuals; a recognition of what is fleeting; there is a sense of calm accommodation to life in those individuals that is markedly missing in those engrossed in a more hectic life style.
Perhaps mainly by circumstance, although sometimes by choice, mankind is less and less a creature of reflection and consideration, and more and more one of tension and outburst. I can hear the contention that modern man, initially swept up in the modern pace, but later willingly enmeshed in it, will have little or no interest in that slower, more reflective time. I can also hear the point that the things we’ve gained outweigh the things we’ve lost, but I keep hearing the voice of the Hague Back rice farmer, and I’m left wondering.
