There’s something subversive about adults playing – in a way, it disrupts “the order of things.” A week later, on the first day of 2012, we were sent home from St. Augustine’s with another disruptive idea:

We can all hear our mother’s words from growing up: ”Don’t sit there and just do nothing.”

I want you to do just the opposite: go home, and take time to just sit there and do nothing.

The new year has begun with a multitude of people talking about taking time to stop, to slow down, to appreciate quiet. Travel writer Pico Iyer wrote an article in The New York Times called ”The Joy of Quiet.” In Poets & Writers, Frank Bures wrote “Inner Space: Clearing Some Room for Inspiration.” Everywhere people seem to be struggling to navigating this fast-paced society and technology-driven culture — and the answer, repeatedly, seems to be stepping-away from it.

This isn’t new wisdom. It’s part of the wisdom behind meditation and yoga, for example. Iyer notes:

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Quiet time, taking time to be pause and be still, is an essential practice for me in my day-to-day life. Much like Iyer,

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.

I’ve said before we have a lot to learn from kids, and Iyer closes his article with a similar sentiment:

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

Might another such “essential” be play time? In a society where we both tend to “take ourselves too seriously” (to a fault) and where there are a lot of serious reasons to be grim; where the focus is on production (“time is money”), where our public schools are de-funding arts and sports programs, and where you can sit next to a person on the subway and not even crack a smile, perhaps we should consider taking time for laughter and fun. Play isn’t something just for kids — it just might open possibilities for a different way of being in the world.

Here’s to more play-fulness in 2012!

“Stop. If you’re inside, go to a window. Throw it open and turn your face to the sky. All that empty space, the deep vastness of the air, the heavens wide about you. The sky is full of insects, and all of them are going somewhere. Every day, above and all around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings.

That’s the letter A: the first thing not to forget. There are others worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes.” -H. Raffles, Insectopedia

I understand the urge to stop and go to a window, to stop and go outside into the sunlight, the urge to see the sky, the urge to feel nature. It’s humbling, then, to realize that these senses have limits – there is so much invisible to the eyes and un-feelable to the skin. It seems even sensuous knowledge cannot fill all the gaps of human epistemology.

As it is, we too often don’t take this time to pause, too look up at the sky, to take a deep breath of air. I feel this in graduate school a lot, always on-the-go, always something I should be doing. If we live in such a way that we don’t even take the time to feel nature, to sense nature — what happens to that which we can’t even sense? In other words, Raffles is justly concerned with the ways in which we are “contained by the limits of our senses” — and yet, imagine the ways this limitation is heightened by our dismissal of that which we can sense, but don’t.

[These were taken during my recent visit home, Dec 2011.]

“The city started life as a settlement and later capital for the Baganda. Its high hills and deep swamps led to a culture of officialdom settling on the hillsides, native shrines settling on the hill tops, and the ordinary people navigating the fertile valleys, often in canoes.

Kampala’s intimate relationship with water is still reflected in the numerous water-linked native toponyms like Lugogo (“water channel”), and Nakivubo (“fishing-place”).

The waterways disappeared with colonial-era draining to make way for the modern city. This has not prevented the water from emphatically reclaiming its space every rainy season, when massive flooding basically overwhelms the city’s drainage system, leading to death and disruption.”

Fascinating! I had never heard about this historical relationship Kampala has with water. This discovery (on my part) coincided nicely with a course on the Indian Ocean, and in particular with an article I read for class by Pamila Gupta entitled Cartographies of Islandness: Space and Place in the World Islands Development, Dubai.  Gupta’s piece facilitates thinking about the shifting and impermanent forms of ‘place-making’ and the important intersections between spacial-ity and class/history/imagination.

My own conversations about Kampala lacked such historical grounding, but are insightful for considering the idea of ‘place-making.’ Both Ugandan and American friends have described the city to me as “chaotic” and always with a tone edged with distaste. I always played devil’s advocate: “Yeah, but there’s a method to the madness” or “Yeah, but that’s because it’s so full of life.” But, neither response actually denies their assertion since it would be unfair to the capital city to deny her chaotic qualities: the mad rush of boda boda drivers when the stop light turns green, the barely inching forward afternoon “jam,” exacerbated by flooding the rainy season, the throngs of people on the crisscrossing streets of central Kampala, walking or lingering or unloading goods from trucks that have probably traveled from Mombasa, so that it is nearly impossible to actually drive on the streets, and the density of matutus at the old taxi park that, from a distance, looks impossible to navigate, but somehow, centimeter-my-centimeter, the drivers manage to make it out of the crowded lot.

But there is also a Kampala that functions as “cosmopolitan non-place” as Gupta calls it.  This is the Kampala with big shopping malls and fancy hotels and quiet(er) neighborhoods. The Kampala that almost doesn’t feel like Kampala given the relative lack of people and dust. This is the Kampala that gets talked about by foreigners, exchanging information about this “hidden gem” of a restaurant or that one, or is inhabited by the wealthier class of Ugandans, or is the every-now-and-then destination of city-goers looking to buy the items you can’t get anywhere else in the country. This Kampala almost functions like an island – and a certain type of island that affords an escape of sorts, but is only reachable by a certain class and whose existence is in part defined by the more-chaotic Kampala with which it contrasts.

The title of the OpEd is acute in its naming “A city of two tales.” The recent discussion of Kampala’s inadequate city-planning and possibilities of re-making Kampala is an effort that inspires some skepticism regarding the intentions behind such an effort. Tensions have arisen with the recent evictions of market vendors who populate much of Kampala. Such events stir up questions involved in place-making such as spatial relations and social worldings, as well as tourism, capitalism, and modernization (Gupta also wrote about this as does scholar Mike Davis). How do the tensions in Kampala reflect disparate sets of imagined cityscapes? As the news article notes, current events have “increasingly had the effect of formalizing the spiritual divide between the city’s vibrant native identities on the one hand, and the veritable “Dubai-by-the-lake” being attempted by the thrusting modern republicans.” It becomes clear, then, that a discussion of re-designing the cityscape requires negotiating history, culture, and memory, as well as politics.

In light of all this, I found it interesting to think about Kampala, not only as a body of water in which nature re-asserts itself each year, but also as an island – and as a site that brings into relief these complex relationships between memory, history, class, and cultural change.

Artist 1: Aziz Azion

Artist 2: Jamal

Instrument: the Adungu (of northern Uganda)

Student production: totally written/produced by two of my former students

I love going to these festivals because I am always surprised by something – this time it was a book about a local artist: New York: Finger Paintings by Jorge Colombo. I have recently acquired an affinity for finger painting – probably primarily because it’s a creative medium that is playful and allows me to get my hands dirty. So, needless to say, “finger painting” caught my eye.

Checking out his work, when I got home: it’s pretty neat. His iPhone finger paintings have actually been featured on the cover of The New Yorker several times. Here’s my fav:

“I think the world heaved a sigh of relief when he [Obama] was elected. For so long, people felt like they were hitting their heads again bricks walls, now that wall was a door, the door was open a crack, and the question was: would it be kicked open or slammed shut? But, that kicking open is the responsibility of movements, not one person…”

– Amy Goodman

I think she is right to displace the criticism of the Obama administration. I am guilty of being one of those who, getting caught up in the idealism during the 2008 elections, placed too much hope in Obama and have become somewhat disillusioned. I say I’m ‘guilty’ because it’s easy to place the responsibility elsewhere. But Amy’s right: change is no one-man-show. It is the work of a movement. Here’s to kicking open the door!

“I am a slave to the money I despise.”

The contradictions alluded to in this sentence are profound – and cause for reflection. We have a consciousness of a failed system, but how to move forward when it is so much a part of who we are? As Zizek articulated quite nicely,

“This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom.”

I think this is a fundamental challenge for us all not the road ahead. In the meantime… I return to my other master: grad school.

Also, for more Zizek, go here.