Time waits for no one

Time waits for no one, so we’re told.
Time is, however, a modern concept, something we’ve evolved – that is time keeping, rather than time. Before industrialisation, the only time that mattered was determined by the seasons and daylight – the former to plant and harvest, the latter to see what you were doing. It’s tough not working to time when everything else is so regulated – and with technology moving as it is, so time becomes more demanding – can we break the habit of ‘needing more hours in the day’, ‘if only time stood still’. In South Africa we have a lovely saying in Afrikaans which translates to ‘tomorrow is another day’, there are similar words from Spanish and Portguese that have seeped into the South African languages too, and then we have ‘African time’ – sometimes used in a derogatory way, but also with yearning to ‘get off the treadmill’.

Time is an issue – it’s featured as a post on TSL before and it seems to be a theme for some of our books, too.