Time moves in cycles
The present, past, and future are constantly interacting. Action in the present creates ripples that not only alter the future but also alter the past.
I’ve written before about the gradualism of collapse. Despite what media convention might have us believe, an apocalypse is not a singular catastrophic event, but rather the gradual unfolding of a series of smaller, and then bigger, catastrophes and their consequences, each building upon one another over time. It is not necessarily the watershed imagery of one radical new event, but rather the gradual unveiling of all the past wrongs that have laid the path for the present and forthcoming events that are catastrophic enough to seemingly stop time.
I read the other day that time, in the 21st century, seems to be moving faster. This is because today, we live in a near-constant bombardment of information. The human brain was not built to be plugged in all the time, and it has not yet evolved to fully accommodate the information overload of constant “connection” and stimulation. So, the way our brains wrap themselves around that which they cannot fully make space for is to make time move faster. From the moment we wake up, we are met with the outside world, with communications, with information, with moving and still images, with the perception of others, and the mirror it holds to our own perception of self.
Within the constraints of capitalism, our time is and has always been our most valuable resource. It is what we sell and buy. Our time is assigned a weight and number value based on the work we do, and how valuable that specific work is to uphold the violent and exploitative nature of capital. This inverted value system creates a world where the time of people who show up to film mediocre television shows and movies is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per the hour, while the time of people who do the most important, most generative work -- those who grow and raise our food, those who teach our children and care for our elderly, those who clean and sanitize the our space -- is worth much, much less despite the work being more impactful, more meaningful and more necessary in countless ways. The most necessary work is often the least valued because it does not further the immensity of profit. Because this work is so damn necessary and important, it cannot be scarce, and the god of capitalism runs off and rewards scarcity. The majority of us live within the confines of this sense of precarity. We feel that our time seems to be moving faster while being valued as less and less.
Quantum physicists are continuing their trend of arriving hundreds of years late to indigenous scientific knowledge that has existed for millennia. They are testing theories that time itself moves in cycles rather than linear progression. Indigenous cosmologies and scientists across Africa have long known that time is cyclical, folding in on itself and layering with no definite beginning or ending. Indigenous cosmologies have always conceptualized time as a layered, cyclical thing that is alive and breathing, itself, in a sense rather than the linear segment of organization that European concepts have given us. Time folds in on itself, and these layers are precisely what make it priceless. Work in an Afro/indigenous timetable cannot be quantified in the same way.
When Columbus and his crew came upon the Indigenous Arawak people in the Caribbean, whom they would eventually slaughter, the Spaniards were stunned by the idea that no one exchanged currency for anything. That people gave time and things freely. That time, to these people, was not a commodity to be bought and sold. They were generous, welcoming, non-violent, and unhurried -- all qualities that elude systems built on linear concepts of scarce, quantifiable time.
In a cyclical conceptualization of time, the present, past, and future are constantly interacting. Action in the present creates ripples that not only alter the future, but also alter the past by altering the ways we understand and view it.
Every time I make a choice that positively alters my future, I am in some way, grasping that untouchable hand of time and reaching back to change something about the past.
The most direct example of this in my life right now is my children. Children’s concept of time is perfect. To them, there is no shortage of time because they have not yet become accustomed to someone assigning a number value to their time. They try to remind me not to hurry through life, to stretch my time and see it as a gift, rather than a resource. In my children, I see time overlapping and converging. I see them healing past, present, and future. The actions I choose with them every day build up to a yet-to-be-determined future, while also giving back to the already destined past. When I let my children take up space, when I let them be loud, and run freely, have the space, choice and autonomy to discover what is most authentic to them, we build towards a future and heal the past.
As a child, I felt like I couldn’t take up space. I come from a lineage of people who had been conditioned to believe that the way to protect oneself was to shrink. I protected myself by making myself as small and as silent as possible. The idea that children were to be seen and not heard was an idea rooted in the violence and abuse of systems of labor exploitation, slavery, and colonization.
I come from a lineage of people who were conditioned to make themselves as small and silent as possible, and who believed their scarce, undervalued time would be more rewarded with this shrinking sort of obedience. And they believed this because of the sort of conditioning that had been literally beaten into them for centuries and generations by systems that broke them to control them. I understand why Black parents thought that protecting their children from the society that routinely killed them was to shrink them, even though I know it wasn’t true. But by letting my children exist in their fullness, I can teach them to carry that forward, so they will allow their children the same. In these small daily actions, we pass the torch of intergenerational healing that reverberates seven decades into the future and seven decades into the past. I can heal the part of little me and my inner child who felt like she could not exist in such a way, so much so that she never even thought to conceive of what her fullness was, and I can offer a bit of balm to all the ancestors who came before me, who were conditioned in their childhood to shrink as a way of self preservation. We can create a new cycle.
Sometimes, I stop and ask myself aloud: how many of my ancestors’ hopes, wishes, and prayers have been manifested in my existence?
But still, I carry a tepid sort of optimism for this world. It’s not that I don’t believe this world could be a much better place; it’s that I struggle to believe that as many of us who need to will make the necessary transformations to make this world a better place. It can without a shadow of doubt be a better world -- but only if we choose to become the sort of people who can make it a better world.
If we think about anything -- any of the litany of unpleasant and disheartening news that we are bombarded with daily -- we can recognize how our response to it proves to be a mirror into not only the pasts we have condoned and allowed to go unreckoned for, but also into the futures we are cosigning into fruition. The way we regard and respond to the bleak realities of the world today alters the past not in that it changes the static action that has already taken place, but that it reestablishes a new precedent for what will or will not be tolerated, and what we will or will not allow to continue.
As I write this, my attention has been focused on the recent unveilings around the Epstein files.
These records prove indisputably that many of the most powerful and prominent people in the world today were in some way connected to, perpetuating, and benefiting from child trafficking and abuse. But when I think of the folds of time, I remember that a large part of this country’s foundation was built on human and child trafficking and abuse. Children were trafficked and abused during the Transatlantic and domestic slave trades and during the genocide and displacement of Native Americans. The human trafficking and abuse that enabled the very creation of this country has never been formally condemned or reckoned with in any sincere or real way. When we remember this, we see how this present is a direct consequence of that past. We see an unfortunate cycle of time.
The way we respond to this unfolding, and the lack of action, accountability, and justice that we collectively allow, illuminates the way we have responded similarly in the past. People like Thomas Jefferson, who is still lauded and celebrated by this country, were child traffickers and abusers. Jefferson enslaved his own biological children in addition to enslaving countless other children. Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved child, when she was only 14 years old. By the time she was 16, she had given birth to her first child with him who Jefferson would also enslave. Jefferson was not an anomaly, and these networks of human trafficking and abuse are baked into the very crust of this nation. When you realize where we’ve come from, you realize the Epstein scandal — and the fact that some of the most prominent, powerful, and celebrated people in every area of this society — as disturbing as it is, is not shocking but rather a sick continuation of cycles of violence and abuse that have plagued this country since its inception. Rather than condemning him for his sins, we teach our children in schools to celebrate Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence. We carry currency with his image, and see statues and tributes to him everywhere. This country has a long history of revering abusers. So, of course, the country that celebrates child rapists has an issue today with many of its high-profile figures and politicians being implicated in child trafficking.
So how much longer will we tolerate it? How long until we ignore it again? Will we allow ourselves to move on and simply let linear notions of time sweep this continued violence under the rug of history? Or will we find our own ways to hold these sickos accountable? Will we give them the opportunity to believe we will let them forget?
We can never change these horrible pasts that has transpired, but we do have the opportunity to create some sort of energetic resonance, to send some vibration of healing across the layer of time, in the ways we remember this history and in the actions we, as a collective, take right now to establish another set of social agreements and a new precedent -- one where the abuse and exploitation of children is in absolutely no way ever allowed, accepted, or ignored.
I have no doubt that Trump and his cronies on both sides of the aisle will find some way to keep avoiding accountability for the sins they have committed and have enabled others to commit. But we can choose how we respond, regardless of whether accountability comes from structures that have already, time and time again, proven themselves wholly unaccountable. If we allow human trafficking to go unpunished, to be swept under the rug, to be used as a political pawn or god forbid, if we allow ourselves to get distracted and forget about it, we become complicit in it. If we wait on a justice department that is as biased, complicit and compromised as it gets to deliver any result justice, we, as a society, become complicit. And in that lack of action, our society continues to affirm and reestablish a precedent that has existed for as long as this country has — that people in powerful positions harm, abuse, exploit, and violate children and get away with it.
As a mother, it is my responsibility to protect my children. It is my responsibility to protect others’ children. To protect the children from being gunned down at the school they should feel safe in. To protect the children from being pepper-sprayed, zip-tied, or otherwise brutalized in ICE raids. To protect the children from abusers and predators like the people in the Epstein files who are being shielded by this government. To protect the children in Gaza from being maimed, starved, and buried alive in rubble. To protect the children from being slaughtered and famished in conflicts perpetuated by governments and corporate interests in Sudan. To protect the children who are not yet capable of protecting themselves, so they can grow up knowing the responsibility to protect the children who come after them. And as the timeline of mutual responsibility and protection moves forward, overlapping and encircling itself, we create a future where these ills, violences, and evils are completely eradicated.
If hurt people hurt people cyclically, the way to disrupt that cycle is by doing everything in our individual and collective power to ensure no other people get hurt. Over time, we shift that cycle to a cycle where no one has been hur,t so no one hurts anyone else; a future where no one has been hurt, so no one can get away with hurting anyone. I’m writing in overly simplified terms because I am trying to qualify the infinite
The society that praises people who enslaved and abused children becomes the society where children are lynched and mutilated becomes the society that taxes people to send bombs to Israel that explode children’s limbs becomes the society that ignores the suffering of children in Sudan becomes the society where ICE agents receive “super-checks” to pepper one year olds and separate children from their parents becomes the society where school shootings are so routine that four years olds know what an active shooter drill is becomes the society where countless prominent politicians and wealthy elites can be tied to a prolific child trafficker, not fearing consequences and maintaining positions of immense wealth, privilege, and power.
I’m not saying what I want to say fully because I don’t want to be sued, but yes, you know what I mean.
If time is truly cyclical and the present not only dictates the future but reaches back to alter the past, our actions in this moment carry a weight more unfathomable than ever.
How do we protect the children of the present, so we can protect the children of the future and offer some healing to the children who have already been harmed in the past? How do we change timelines and shift into a different cycle where no child is ever allowed to be harmed or mistreated? What role will you play in creating a different cycle or maintaining the same fucked up one?
This week’s medicine is another simple one: consider one action you are already taking or can take that will positively affect your future and that can, in some way, send some healing to your inner child or to those who came before you. When I pray to ancestors, I pray that my healing resonates in such a way that it also offers them relief.