Due to a partially lost battle with the polio virus, life imposed a natural slowdown on me.
When I was a child, my father said that I would never be able to keep up with the crowd. In physical education classes, the teachers inevitably gave me a certificate of unfitness, not to mention an exclusion ticket because of my dragging paw. In primary school, you also had to face taunts, intimidation and find a space to survive.
All of this left traces and wounds that my dad unfortunately helped to inscribe more deeply in my being.
Dad slowed my momentum by constantly reminding me of the physical limitations nature imposed on me because of what he called my bad leg. For the sake of overprotection, he almost involuntarily converted me into this baby elephant from a Chinese legend that was tied with a thin rope, he who never tried to free himself as an adult, he who, when he grew up, no longer believed in his abilities. Deeply marked by his past, the giant still thought himself powerless in the face of the same cord that imprisoned him during his youth.
If I have become hyperactive in my head today, it is thanks to my mother who never missed an opportunity to remind me that I could accelerate with my brain, join the peloton in a different way and even hope to lead a race. If my father almost took me off the track, my mother made me a different kind of speed runner.
I am one of the people who now needs to relearn how to slow down. Yet, ironically, in the farming and pastoral culture that I grew up in, time is more flexible and those who panic about running out of time are often set the record straight by the proverbs of popular wisdom.
No matter how much you are in a hurry, Grandpa said, you will never be able to command your bottom to gallop in front of you. The only thing you risk is being picked up ass over head.
White people invented the watch, but never had time. This is another proverb that I loved to draw out. At least before my own arm went into the twister.
Today, I know that it is not easy to escape this mad rush, this trap of modern times. Capitalism is a system that runs on the clock. It’s an obstacle course where conventional wisdom views time as money. Besides, if time is money, we should perhaps start taxing others who ask us if we have a minute of our time to devote to them.
We are so subservient to this race that we teach our children to surpass themselves. An expression which, in my opinion, is one of the strangest in the French language. When we spend so many years trying to beat the only image we see in the rearview mirror, it means that there is a good part of life that escapes us. It is impossible to surpass yourself. Unless he made a double of himself as a training partner, but last I heard, human cloning was still taboo.
One thing is certain, if we have normalized this lexical drift, it is because capitalism pushes us to chase what is leaking when we should cherish the most important thing that remains.
But how can we avoid falling into the dictates of speed and damaging stress hormones when our societies believe that happiness depends much more on the verb to have than on the verb to be? Despite a leg that drags, I confess here that I live with a certain dependence on work. A problem that my partner diagnosed and that my mother tried to deprogram before bowing out.
A few years before her death, she told me:
“Boucar, your father thought you would never be a great runner, but he was wrong. You are a running champion despite your physical handicap.
But now that you’re getting older and the weight of age is weighing on you a little more, you might benefit from slowing down. You know, my son, in life, we often go in circles in our race against time, this tireless ticker that all our sprints never manage to catch up with.
We run while forgetting that time belongs to us and that we just need to stop to take it and use it for what really matters. Art teaches us that it is during our lifetime that we must allow ourselves some downtime, because we do not know what it is made of, but we are certain that death lasts an eternity.
If members of the same family are parts of the same heart, we should all slow down a little to allow the different parts of that heart to beat at the same rate. »