Back home time is something that is possible to waste. We walk around, constantly thinking about «could I spend this time better?», and if the answer is yes the fact keeps hunting you until you «spend the time better». I've caught myself thinking that in a couple of occations at Tulip, when we have been sitting around waiting without anything to do for a couple of hours. I feel my time is wasted, but can you really waste time?
I think understanding some of this might improve my patience. There is a time for everything. From a Christian perspective, if God had planned for me to sit waiting at Tulip for some hours, I guess he had a reason for it. After all, it resulted in a blog post. From a non-religious perspective, what does it matter? A couple of hours here and there, yes you might lose some interesting experience, an oppourtonity, whatever. But what is it to gain in dwelling at something you didn't do?
I haven't experienced it much here(yet), but I've read somewhere that the general African way of looking at time is that the «time» is when something is happening. That way it's actually impossible to waste time, because if you do what we western people would consider as a waste of time (a.k.a. doing nothing), you aren't wasting any time, because that time isn't worth collecting!
It might be related to that back home there's always something you can do, but here there will always be times where there's quite simply nothing to do, so you don't have to feel you're wasting your time when you're doing nothing. Is that something we lost on our way trying to collect all the best experiences, best skills, best reputation and not to mention as much money as possible?
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Nice post ;)
As a non Chistian, from a pegan point of view is where I will speak from. You are never wasting time, the time where you are sitting and "doing nothing"...this is time that you reflec on the things you have done recently. You think about things that you want to know more about, or things you know nothing about but would like to learn. We basicaly call this a life path moment. Where your brain catches up with everything in the past days that you have learned or have done. As well as consider the things that you aspire to gain knowledge in. So if you look at it that way, time is never a waste ;)
Hei! Som student på GUS - Studium i Tverrkulturell Kommunikasjon - har vi lært om handlingstid: dvs at tiden går bare når det skjer en handling. Selv om menneskene rundt deg gjør noe; hvis du bare sitter stille, så går ikke tiden. Litt rart for oss å forstå, men det er vanlig i Afrika. Håper ellers Gud bruker deg og at du stadig oppdager nye sider ved han! Hilsen kristen søster på andre siden av kloden:)
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