Slow

Mother City time

‘POLE, POLE NDIO MWENDO’
Slow, slow is the way to go

Time – ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, ‘time is of the essence’, ‘time is money’ – These are some of the attitudes towards time that many of us grew up with. And yet I find myself relating to these less and less. I had a watch once. It was a leaving gift after 4 years of baffling my workmates, working for an organization and never wearing a watch. I wore the watch once, on a date, and I lost it. Watching time closely has never really seemed that important.

Attitudes towards time vary enormously across the world. While working in Zambia as a Teacher Trainer, I was chatting to a colleague outside my office. He mentioned an academic journal that I thought sounded interesting and he promised I could borrow it. He said “I’ll lend it to you. I’m coming now”. And so I waited. I stood there and I waited. Then I waited some more.

About 20 minutes later I gave up and quietly thought to myself ‘how rude’. But of course it wasn’t rude at all. He did return with the publication as promised but it was the next day. I shared my waiting story and we laughed together. His idea of ‘now’ and mine were very different. In Kenya there is ‘pole pole’, take it steady or slowly, slowly. In Indonesia there is flexible thinking when it comes to time. It’s referred to as ‘Jam Karet’, or ‘Rubber Time’. And then there’s ‘Waktu molor’, a kind of compensation, where everyone just expects that things won’t happen on time, a type of tolerated tardiness.

We’ve lived in cities which are notorious for terrible traffic like Nairobi and Jakarta. I don’t get too wound up about it anymore. That won’t change a thing. It will take as long as it takes! But so many people swipe their phones incessantly, checking waze or GPS and it all causes them great stress. “We should be there in 10 minutes”. It takes 20. So what?!

It makes me think of that Nitin Sawney song Street Guru where the guy says “You know, a lot of times people are rude because they want like immediate access or immediate information…You know some things in life can’t be immediate, sometimes you gotta wait and let things happen’. So why are we so bad at waiting?

And that takes us to Mother City Time. I can remember joining a local video rentals shop about 15 years ago, (yes VHS hire). The man was fiddling with my membership card when he asked me “do you know why they call it the Mother City?” and he went on to joke, “it takes 9 months to get anything done here”. But I’m really ‘very o.k’ with that.

Stuff rarely has to be done ‘now now’ or even ‘just now’ as long as it gets done. Some Capetonians have a different attitude towards time. It’s one of the many reasons that it’s such a special place. I don’t know of anywhere else in the world where some people will swerve, park up and jump out of their vehicles to stare at a Southern Right whale! They make time for that. The priority for many people on a Friday afternoon is not to finish that report at work but to to watch the sunset with a bottle of fine, Western Cape wine.

We’re living in a world where we have more technology than ever before, which should be making us more time efficient. But is any of it actually freeing up any of our time? And if it is, then why is everyone in such a rush?

© Maggie M / Mother City Time