Marking Time?

When Nicole Fleetwood wrote her book, Marking Time- Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, in 2020, she seemingly had one thing in mind, which was to reveal how America’s prisons are filled with art, despite the isolation and degradation. 

Fleetwood revealed that despite the isolation and degradation prisoners experienced, the incarcerated were driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanises them. 
Fleetwood, a Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, won several awards with her work, including, 2020, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2021, Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, 2021, Joint winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, 2021, Winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award and 2021, Winner of the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize. Quiet a good feat. 

Marking time, by definition in the English language is to “march in one place without moving forward”. In effect, marking time is to do little while waiting for something that is going to happen, and within the context of prison; when incarcerated and away from families and communities you are most likely, out of despair, going to do little, count the days and wait for the day you will gain your freedom again. For this reason, I brought in Fleetwood’s work to explain my point. 

Well, whereas you can mark time in prison (that is do little until you gain back your freedom), it shouldn’t be your routine when you have your liberty now. 
Unfortunately, despite all the opportunities around us, some have imprisoned their minds, marking time in the hope that one day something better will come up.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with taking up an apprenticeship, changing course of action or deciding on a complete turnaround when you feel your current circumstance is not properly aligned with your goals and aspirations in life. Understandably, in the scheme of things, that cannot be described as marking time because it is either an adjustment phase of your life or a period of apprenticeship to become masterful at a trade you are doing or want to pursue.

In fact, what I am referring to here as marking time is about aimless living, that state of despondency where you feel so disconnected from the world around you. In this state, you wake up in the morning engaged in the same routine as the day before, the week before, the month before and the year before. But how can you engage in the same thing over and over again and expect different results? And what would you call this situation? I bet you know the response to this question, don’t you? If you don’t, give Albert Einstein a call!

So, Einstein gently reminds us that “we can’t use the same level of thinking as we did when we created the problem in the first place” to solve it, meaning that we need a paradigm shift to deal with spots of border when we find ourselves in one.
 Do you also remember this anonymous quote: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? You therefore need to shift your paradigm to deal with current problems- financial or otherwise. 

Now, let us look at some practical steps that will help you to stop marking time. And to do this, I am going to rely on the article I wrote in this column for the May 8, 2015 edition, under the headline, Deal with the blind spots in your finances. 

In this edition (May 8, 2015), my focus was on how paradigm shifts move our finances, help us deal with blind spots and prevent our minds from switching to idle mode. 
For me, dealing with your blind spots is crucial. Science teaches us that while we may think we see well, we have blind spots and that in the back of the eye where the optic nerve inserts into the retina is an area with no rods or cones for detecting light, known as the “blind spot”, which prevents a 360-degree view of everything.

In a New Scientist magazine article on blindness and attention, the results were revealing. Try and picture it: 

“You’re walking across a college campus when a stranger asks you for directions. While you’re talking to him, two men pass between you carrying a wooden door. 
You feel a moment’s irritation, but they move on and you carry on describing the route. When you’ve finished, the stranger informs you that you’ve just taken part in a psychology experiment.

‘Did you notice anything change after the two men passed with the door?’ he asks. ‘No,’ you reply uneasily. He then explains that the man who initially approached you walked off behind the door, leaving him in his place.

The first man now comes up to join you. Looking at them standing side by side, you notice that the two are of different height and build, are dressed differently, have different haircuts and different voices.

It sounds impossible, but when Daniel Simmons, a psychologist at Harvard University, and his colleague Daniel Levin of Kent State University in Ohio actually did this experiment, they found that fully 50 per cent of those who took part failed to notice the substitution”.

Management consultant, Jim Harris, has another angle to blind spots: “Our blind spots go unnoticed, because the images in the blind spot of each eye are filled in by the visual field of the other eye. However, cover one eye and you’ ll swear any objects appearing in the blind spot of your seeing eye are simply not there. But our brains abhor a visual vacuum, so instead of seeing a hole or a black spot, they fill in the blind spot”.

So once you fail to see clearly, what you ought to see, you literally become “short-sighted”. Looking ahead becomes difficult and instead of you becoming a goal-getter, full of life, you rather become hopeless, marking time. Life is full of art so make your own meaning of it by stopping to mark time. 

Don’t imprison the mind, be free, open and embrace all opportunities.
botabil@gmail.com