My Time Is Not My Own

Upon committing to deferring matriculation for a year and opting to take a Bridge Year, many people asked me why I made the decision I made. They did not ask me because they necessarily agreed or disagreed with my decision. They simply asked, and I am still asked, because they wanted to know what motivated my decision. The truth is it was a whole host of reasons, and it would be unnecessary and irrelevant to this blog to go into all of them. However, there is one reason that I chose to take a Bridge Year abroad that I want to elaborate on because I feel like it is worth explaining.

I am a notorious procrastinator. If you talk to anyone who knows me well they will attest to this. My parents and brother can attest to it because they have been kept awake by my bedroom light deep into the night because I was up late studying for a test that I had known about for weeks. My high school classmates can attest to it because many of them received phone calls in the middle of the night from me asking for help. And if they ever needed help they never failed to call me. Not because they were confident that I would be able to help them, but because they knew that I would most certainly be up cramming to finish my assignment the night before it was due. Though I have never set foot on a college campus as an enrolled freshman, something I know about entering college is that one enters a drastically different environment (most of the time, unless one went to a boarding school) from the one he was accustomed to in high school. An individual no longer lives at home; he takes less classes; he has more free time and new freedoms. One of the things I feared about going straight into college was that in a new environment I would try to maintain the behaviors I was accustomed to and comfortable with in high school, behaviors and habits that I felt had worked fine for me the previous eighteen years of my existence. This would only be natural: to simply behave the way I have always behaved. However, this Bridge Year has allowed me the time and practice ground to examine my habits and behaviors and refine them to better suit a free, independent lifestyle. And the behavior that I have come to deplore, and must work on the most, is my shameful propensity to procrastinate. More broadly, my whole perception of time and my time-management has changed, and that is the topic of this blog: How Ghana has changed my perception of my time.

A part of Ghanaian culture that I have come to love and appreciate is the laid-back nature of people. People, for the most part, are very relaxed. There are not too many high-strung individuals, and it is not often that you will find someone growing overly worked up over an inconvenience or quagmire. In an earlier blog post I talked a bit about the collective, brotherly nature of Ghanaian society, and this holds true in leisure. People enjoy relaxing and having a good time with the people they love the most. For example, I can step out my front door in East Legon, Accra and will never have any trouble finding a game or Rummy to join. There are always men sitting in front of their houses either playing cards, chatting, or listening to the radio, and they welcome a companion to join them in their leisure. This is to be admired. However, too much of most things are usually not good, and the laid-back attitude and indulgence in leisure is no different. People are sometime easygoing to a fault. The free-spirit lifestyle that most people choose to live by can often lead to over-indulgence in leisure. Sometimes people are even idle and seemingly basic, menial tasks may take hours or days to get done depending on the job. Many people joke about “African Time.” “African Time” is the name people, locals included, use refer to Africans’ propensity to always be running late. I have found it nearly impossible to schedule meetings in Ghana. Most Ghanaians cannot give you a set time of their arrival, much less suggest a time when a meeting should commence.

For example, last week I wanted to meet a Ghanaian friend of mine, George, for dinner. I suggested 7:00 PM on Tuesday. He said, “Of course Nick. That’s fine. 7:00, 7:30 sounds good to me.” I knew that when he said that he was hinting to me that there was a slim chance he would meet me at 7:00 PM, and there was a good chance that he would arrive after 7:30 PM – likely closer to 8:00 PM. Here is another example…In America, when one receives a wedding invitation that says, “The wedding ceremony will commence at 6:30 PM on Saturday evening” he can be sure that if he shows up at 7:00 PM the Church doors will most likely be closed, he will have to embarrassingly walk into the chapel and sit down (likely a conspicuous spectacle), and he will have missed the start of the wedding. However, in Ghana it is different. My host auntie and host sister attended a wedding three Sundays ago. The wedding was scheduled to begin at 10:00 AM. The bride did not show up until 12:30 PM! And the guests and attendees had to wait and sing hymnals to pass the time as they waited two and a half hours for the bride to show up to her own wedding.

Here is one last example. In the previous blog (above) I talked about the donation, building, and installation of the whiteboards in the school I teach at. However, I did not mention the debacle that nearly thwarted all of our efforts. I bought the three ‘4 x 12’ pieces of ¾ inch thick plywood a week and a half before we actually installed the boards. We kept the three pieces of plywood just outside the side door of our house. We figured this would be fine because we live in a compound. The area is gated and an eight and a half foot cement wall encompasses the whole compound. This is a fairly common setup in Ghana, and such compounds are rarely robbed. However, the night before we were set to install the whiteboards was different. I woke up to check and make sure that we had all of the necessary tools and supplies to build the whiteboards before we loaded the truck to meet the headmaster at the school at 8:30 AM on the morning of December 21, 2009. However, the boards were gone and were nowhere to be found. Mr. Kodji, the headmaster, was scheduled to meet us at the school because he had keys to each of the classrooms so that we could enter each classroom and install the whiteboards. We had to call him and ask him if we could meet later because Charles (my host father) and I had to go to town to buy three new ‘4 x 12’ pieces of ¾ inch thick plywood before we could meet the Mr. Kodji at the school. I asked Charles what time he thought we would be finished making our necessary rounds so that I could give the headmaster a new time to meet us at the school. Charles told me to not give him a time and to tell him that we would call him when we were ready. I could not believe this. It was the holidays and I wanted to be considerate of Mr. Kodji’s time and not leave him waiting around for us to call him when he could be taking care of other responsibilities of his. Charles did not seem to mind, and interestingly enough neither did Mr. Kodji when I called to tell him to wait for us to call him before he went to the school. That is just the way things run in Ghana. To me it is at times frustrating, but I have learned to become more patient, understanding, and respectful of other people’s time. Just to finish the anecdote, we did end up calling Mr. Kodji eventually that day. However, by the time we went to town and returned, it was too late to meet him so we ended up meeti8ng the next day. Nevertheless, setbacks aside, we installed the boards the next day.

These are three classic examples of time trials (no hyphen) in Africa. So what has this taught me? It has taught me to be selfless, practical, wise, and understanding with my time. I have been a procrastinator all of my life, but I am determined to change this cancerous habit. I used to justify my procrastination by saying that, “My time is my own.” My mom would always implore me to use my time wisely. I would always tell her to not worry and that I would get my work done before the deadline so she should not worry. This was always true, but as I reflect I realize that it was a poor way of justifying my behavior. I would tell her that I wanted to enjoy my free time, so instead of taking advantage of my free time to get my work done ahead to time so I would not have to procrastinate I would relax and be idle. This would leave me cramming at the last minute to get my work done, and I often lost hours of sleep because of it. However, I was okay with this. Because I viewed my time as just that, MINE. So I could do with it as I pleased so long as I did get my responsibilities done in the end, and on time. After seeing how time is valued here in Ghana, and after genuine reflection and critique of my own time management, I now realize how selfish this perception is.

The fact is: My time is not my own. Or at least, it does not solely belong to me. In fact, no man can, in the most literal sense of the word, ‘own’ time. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently put it in his novel The Screwtape Letters: “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.” This convicted me when I read it. No man tells the sun when to rise, or when to set. No man can give another man more time on this earth than he is already destined to have. And no man can manipulate time to suit his own schedule. The clock will always move at a rate of sixty seconds per minute. And the future is a place reached by everyone at the rate of twenty-four hours in a day, seven days a week, and three hundred and sixty-five days a year, no matter who you are. And because we are only given a finite number of time on this earth as a ‘pure gift,’ we should cherish it and make the most of each second. This sense of entitlement that my time is MINE is selfish and is rooted in unfounded pride. Because if I am honest, if we are all honest with ourselves, my time is not my own, and neither is my body, or my soul. It is a gift that is to be used prudently to carry out the work it was sent to carry out, and to glorify the One who gave me them as ‘pure gifts.’

I talked about my “Crash” that was precipitated by a sense of complacency. I became complacent because I grew very comfortable with the Ghanaian lifestyle and my life here. I persuaded myself that the future – or at least my time here – was going to be agreeable so I did not need to worry about the future or what to do with my time. I later realized how self-absorbed this is. And this is one of the thoughts that motivated me in putting together the initiatives to help Maamobi Prisons No. 1 JSS. As I have said before, I do feel morally obligated to give back because I am so blessed. I have a responsibility to make the most of the finite amount of time I have been given. I should spend my life giving myself patiently and generously to each moment for the good of posterity. There is something to be admired in the easygoing spirit of Ghanaians. And leisure and relaxation are healthy, even necessary, in leading a sane and fulfilling existence – but only to a point. I am starting to find out what works best for me, and everyone is different. We all manage our time differently, and different people do marvelously for themselves by managing their time in the way that works best for them. I have learned that the key is to find what works best for me and to stay true to that. I am not perfect, and I will continue to struggle with time management. My time is not my own. And I can rest my head in peace at night if I can look back on the prior day and say that I pulled all I could out of each second – each ‘pure gift’ – I was given.