“Time is like gold. Work with it, but don’t let it work on you.”
- Inscription on Haile Selassie I Monument in Addis Ababa
This past week was Spring Forward in the United States, where the clocks all move by an hour the day after everybody forgets it’s going to happen. The rest of the week is usually spent angry at something — work, an appointment, the kids, your appetite — as the body adjusts to having its routine arbitrarily nudged off its axis.
These decisions weren’t always arbitrary and were often tied to agricultural needs in societies where daylight was inconsistent as the seasons changed. However, the changes were also less arbitrary at scale: with no industrialized society, the “time is money” adage was nonexistent, and society already was ebbing and flowing with the sun. There was no electricity. The clock, like the calendar, was primarily based on the cycles of the giant fireball that fuels existence.
Time really fucked with me in Ethiopia, and not because of jet lag. Because of its location on the map, Ethiopia’s sunrise and sunset has consistently been a twelve hour 6 AM - 6 PM cycle. “There’s no daylight savings time in Ethiopia” is not an especially smart or interesting insight, thus I don’t intend to blog about how it’s better or worse. In fact, I think all the people who spend a lot of energy mad at Daylight Savings Time are probably pretty dumb. Sleep in. You’ll be okay in a week or so.
Instead, what I find interesting is how the culture there — still reliant on sustenance farming — makes it such that any attempt at mass change on how Ethiopians tell time is treated with contemptuous rejection. Based on some of the reading I’ve done, there are socio-political interpretations of this as inherently reactionary. Those are very silly interpretations because it is actually extremely cool: as one of the world’s oldest societies, the refusal to engage with outside calendars and clocks is a subtle middle finger to the imperial world. Why would Ethiopia need a new calendar? It was Enoch’s idea in the first place.
Hanging with orthodox in Ethiopia was amusing because they knew they were dealing with an idiot American, thus setting up meeting times always required an extra level of internal calculation. Dawn at 6 AM is the beginning of the 12 hour clock, thus meeting someone during the day at 3 can be the equivalent to meeting at 9 AM if one does not stop to confirm that everyone means the same 3 o’clock. Asking people about the Marxist-Leninist revolution of 1974 would, at times, draw sighs, eyerolls, and a rather pointed “You mean 1966?” because by the Ethiopian calendar it is only 2016.
It’s a lot like America, where every single person is convinced that they way they do things is the right way and an outsider questioning that logic is potentially an invitation for an ass kicking. Maybe that’s why I felt so at home in Addis and Shashamane. Every American knows how to operate around people who might throttle them for disturbing the vibrations of the room. None of our shit in America makes sense either, unless you were raised in it, in which case all of it makes perfect sense.
Aside from the cultural obstinance I can always appreciate, what I loved about time in Ethiopia (and what I hate about the daylight savings time debate) is that it was impossible to forget why we tell time. The chants as the sun rises and the clock strikes 00:00 for the start of the 12 hour day and the sunlight necessary to plow the fields. The chants as the sun sets and the clock rolls over to night, with Believers gathering at the Tewahedo churches for prayer and bread. As a comfy first world writer, I feel it necessary to avoid romanticizing the impoverishment and hierarchies I observed that Americans like me avoid every day. In my experience, alienated affluent people have a tendency to project tightly knitted community as a byproduct of the material conditions.
Instead of engaging in that type of weak analysis, much like Tewahedo theology, what I admire is the refusal to create new realities without an eye toward traditions that already exist. Dorm room stoners who talk about how “time isn’t real” are usually idiots, but a unified global clock is indeed a new phenomenon driven by industrial markets rather than pragmatic human desire. Nobody gives a shit if 9 AM in Beijing is aligned to the minute with 9 PM in Eastern Standard Time except for investment banking professionals. I’m not particularly interested in what investment bankers think about the clock (or anything else for that matter), so I appreciate that in Ethiopia the people who grow the food still have a say in what time the sun comes up.
I could act mighty and pretentious but the discussion around Daylight Savings Time is only fun when people aren’t serious about it. As more and more pedantic weirdoes talk about how it’s unnecessary or puts a strain on people, it feels a bit like impotent folk latching onto anything they can control. What I like about Daylight Savings Time is that when I have to change the clock, I am reminded that I am doing so because we used to have no choice but to acquiesce to nature’s desires for us. The people who say we no longer need Daylight Savings Time are probably right, but at what point have we lost sight of our reliance on the Earth and become overly focused on humanity’s ability to manipulate its resources? At what point does everyone forget that the parables tell us the rivers are sacred because we need the water more than it needs us.