As we approach yet another Ethiopian New Year, our thoughts inevitably turn to the meaning of time and its consequences on our lives as individuals or as communities. New Year is not only a time of festivities but also a time of sober reflection about our lives and their meanings, the topics we avoid addressing on ordinary days.
Have you noticed how time flies these days? It is passing so fast that you have the impression that after Monday comes Friday and after Sunday comes Thursday. It is as if a major shift in time and space is taking place leaving us in awe and surprise. Our lives seem to be shorter than usual. It is as if time and space are shrinking, or their elasticity is becoming less pronounced. It is as if Einstein’s relativity theory does not work anymore, and the time-space continuum needs some kind of revision. Maybe we should be living in the fourth dimension by adding time to the three dimensions we are used to. I am simply kidding.
When was it that we celebrated New Year in Ethiopia? Eleven months back! But the impression that we have now is that New Year was only a month or two back while another New Year is right in front of us, beckoning us to prepare for its celebration. Time is accelerating indeed although we may not be sure whether this acceleration is only a matter of subjective impression or a real shrinking that can be experimentally proved.
Anyway, we are going to celebrate Ethiopian 2017 after a few days. How time is flying! In the mind of the public, there is wisdom, attached to the flight of time. It says: “Time is flying, so is our age!” Although this sounds a banal statement, it hides a deep-seated subconscious regret or a sudden awakening that we are getting older without realizing how time has passed so fast.
This assertion in turn leads us to another quasi-philosophical musing: what have we done or what are we doing with our time? Are we properly using our time or our stay on this planet? Is our life worth living or are we simply surviving? The consensus is that it does not matter whether we live to be one hundred or fifty years old as long as we use time properly and usefully. However, this is not always a valid assertion. Many people who are lucky or unlucky enough to live to be hundred might have spent half of their lives sleeping although most of us are scientifically entitled to spend one third of our age in sleep. Mind you, this is too much time.
The question we almost always evade is the following? What have we done or what are we doing with our time, apart from celebrating it every year as we reach new milestones in our lives? Many people might be proud of living to be ninety or one hundred. This is considered to be a blessing from God or a manifestation of human endurance as expressed in their longevity. The question we often avoid asking is the following: it is good that we have a long life but what have we done to make it worthwhile?
In the final analysis, what is important is not the number of years we count or celebrate each year but what we have done with our time. That is why the notion of proper time management has nowadays assumed such importance in the management of our daily lives. There is also this deeply engrained attitude of not giving the necessary value to our time. Maybe this is because time is given to us for free. Many things that are given freely lose their value as we are accustomed to measuring the worthiness of something by the amount of money we spend on it.
One of the tricks time plays on us is that it passes so silently that we realize its passage when it is only too late. When people are in their youth, they seldom worry about the passage of time. They may have the impression that they will never get older or that old age is unattainably remote from them. Or that aging is not for you but for other people. Yet, when the signs of aging start to appear, they seem to be waking up with panic and come to the realization that the much-feared time of reckoning has indeed come.
It often depends on how we are dealing with the first signs of aging. Many of us deplore the signs and try our best to hide or eradicate them by any means possible. We make urgent corrections to stop something that is natural. We dye our hair; we stretch our facial skin that has lost its elasticity. We often visit eyes clinics or resort to self-treatments with under the counter drugs. Our eyesight starts to blur and reading becomes a daily challenge.
The corrections we make to hide our aging from public view depend on the nature or the signs of aging itself. Some of the signs or symptoms are easier to manage while others are more difficult. It is easier to hide our grey hairs with hair colorants and wear glasses for our weakened sights. Yet, other symptoms of aging are more difficult to deal with such as the cracking of our bones, the pain in our knees and the excruciating ache in our lower backs and the morning discomforts that we often feel before we even step out of our beds.
The wake-up call often comes too late because most of us tend to deny the fact that we are aging. We try to trick nature in many ways, bordering on denial. There are many people in our society that are very sensitive about aging or their age. While going to be seventy, many of them declare that they are only fifty or fifty five. They know that they are lying but they do not tell you their real age. The first reason is self-defense. The message they want to relay is this: “I am still young!”. I remember a late veteran journalist who often declared that he was only sixty years young. This is human nature. Generally speaking, we tend to accept what is comfortable and not what is alarming.
We are increasingly living in a culture that does not celebrate aging. In former times people felt proud of aging because it brought to them respect and love from society. Life was lighter than it is now, and the pressure was hardly felt. It did not really matter whether they were in their fifties or in their eighties. There were privileges they enjoyed back then. When travelling in a bus, they did not worry about finding an unoccupied seat.
Everybody used to scramble to leave their seats for the septuagenarians. Their casual conversations with younger folks were highly enjoyed. Their adventures sounded like scripts from famous war movies. Stories of their young years were avidly absorbed by young people. On official occasions, their speeches and ideas were highly regarded or respectfully accepted.
Nowadays, many people think that being older is similar to a death sentence. Living on pension pay can create a mentality of dependency that was seldom known or felt in older times. This is often unacceptable to many aging folks who lived in dignity and pride throughout their lives, lacking nothing and thankful of God who has provided them with the means of survival however small it might have been. Nowadays, older citizens enjoy less respect and sometimes endure alienation as they are often considered hopeless. Many younger folks are less respectful of their elders who do not command the same high opinion their predecessors enjoyed. To live a long life is not often a source of provide and gratitude. It is rather regarded as burdensome. Senior citizens are forced to spend most of their times sleeping or sitting and gossiping with their equally jobless neighbors or acquaintances.
The story is different nowadays. Old age is rarely celebrated unless you are well off or without worrying how you are going to make ends meet until the next pension payday that is not a big occasion judging by the amount of money that goes into your pocket. Many senior citizens prefer to send their children, mainly the girls abroad for work so that they become their safety nets, so to say. The main duty of immigrants anywhere is to meet the monthly needs of their parents before saving anything worthwhile.
This is in fact the extension of a culture whereby older people relied on their children’s incomes during their twilight years. In rural communities, children used to take over the duties of farming or take over what their parents had been doing before age caught on them. This culture is disappearing nowadays. First, children from the rural communities dream about leaving their villages when they reach a certain age and thereby escape the grinding poverty that has characterized their lives.
As arable land is in short supply these days and income from farming is not often attractive, youngsters prefer to leave the rural areas to the big cities or towns where there are opportunities for jobs and better incomes. Others choose the perils journey to a foreign country sometimes in despair and often eager to live their dreams, achieve success and bring about a better life for themselves and their families.
New-year is a period of transition. Getting bad things behind us let us brace up to embrace a better tomorrow.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2024
