Relentless

It appears you can actually feel it as time goes by. This feeling is animated by the events that shape the relentlessness of change.   Looking back at the past is an exercise we relish, even if laced with unpleasantness. My experience is that the mind seems to flip through the myriad of files stored in […]

It appears you can actually feel it as time goes by. This feeling is animated by the events that shape the relentlessness of change.  

Looking back at the past is an exercise we relish, even if laced with unpleasantness. My experience is that the mind seems to flip through the myriad of files stored in the mind’s vault and retrieve memories that had been stored away, encased in steel, welded shut and buried deep and with little effort open the pages and begin to read.  

Sometimes time drags and sometimes it leapfrogs, but changes happen nonetheless. I am at what might possibly be my prime, and it so happens that the world is in the throes of an epic transmutation that can be described and given an identity. 

Sometimes I wonder if, as part of this relentlessness assault of time, the adjective, “old” has itself been reinvented syntactically. There is this virtual trance I go into when I look back, an experience I suppose I always thought was reserved for that look of farseeing abstraction only those in their 80s and older can conjure. You needed a library big enough to trigger this supra-consciousness and you can only do that if you have been around a while. I grew up in the 90s, but I have seen so much change I feel like a centenarian. The world is now is single place, and everything happens so fast. 

Maybe it is the death of the Queen of England. Of course she is only sovereign in Britain and Northern Ireland but she is without doubt the most conspicuous monarch of the world I grew up in. Monarchs symbolize the mystical value of the bygone, and when you put that together with the human predilection for romanticizing the past you understand why this royal death is so significant. My mind always raced through pictures of Sarauniya Amina, of Hatshepsut, of Tomyris when I see anything in reference to Elizabeth II… now that is gone. 

The approach of the year 2000 brought with it a number of millennial currents. The consolidation of the unipolar world took place but also brought about a new geopolitical conflict still between the East and the West. At this point, aided by the newly invented instant global communication, various millennial tendencies spread throughout the world. These new strains, linked to the power struggle and control could change nature and had important implications for the emergence of the new era we now are in. The present, with its belief in a new world in the making and its eagerness to embrace any new form of thinking, may represent the first “New Age” movement—i.e., the first global secular millennial movement on record. 

Today, as we are already a full generation into a new century, the prevailing attitude worldwide is not one of hope. We can look back at a century that has been ruthless politically and has been characterised by the triumph of the other side.  

Everywhere we look, we see increasing violence and immorality as people’s hearts are focused upon rebellion against good. In the run up to the 2000s and early 2000s, industrial scale terrorism and the war against terrorism began, diseases like AIDS and SARS trended, ethno-religious violence became an epidemic, natural disasters created a place for themselves, fears of financial or economic security became as grave as the fear of death. 

The dilemma when it comes to holding onto hope in the midst of an ever darkening world is whether to go left or right. Not only do our eyes and ears tell us that things are getting no better, sometimes they tell us things are getting worse too.  

There are some very real and very reasonable reasons for someone like me to live in hope these days. These reasons are not anything especially deep. They are things every Nigerian young man or woman knows, but we need to occasionally be reminded of them. 

The age has chosen us – at no time has there ever been this much pressure for a final push, the final onslaught of global integration. The incipient global world offers to us, on a golden platter, what it offered the pharaohs and emperors of yore. 

The future is already here. I sense this as an unknown force – we would not leave this world in chaos and misery forever. Because we have already taken responsibility over this mess, we have to clean it up. And it must be relentless… enough to match the relentlessness of time.