25/11/2024
I will have to research Bayo. He speaks from my heart. And soul. There is so much truth in this and I find myself lost in these games of becoming what I claim to fight. „Relax“ and listen to your own essence. Sense your body, learn to be calm in the mind.
"One of the most persistent and sticky habits of perception that has possessed those of us gestated in modern civilizations is: we tend to see things as separate from each other; we see things as bounded and atomized.
I see the strategy of separation as an attempt to create safety, permanence, fixity, for once and for all, to name things in a final way. That’s the modern impulse. But you run into trouble when things like what’s happening today start to crop up.
We are slowly coming to terms with a world that is more entangling, more relational, and more processual than our modern habits of seeing can allow us to notice or appreciate.
We are not so different from our technologies as modernity would have us believe we are. In shaping computers, we are shaped by computers. In participating in networks, we are conducting and performing emotional labor and shaping ourselves.
It means that we think, act, behave, see, want, yearn, practice, perform, and do things with the world and with others. The presumption that we act as individuals is already being haunted by the idea of an entangled world.
My work in thinking about climate change through the prism of Indigenous realities, poetry, and entanglement, is basically to note that we need to find the places of power with which we might respond to something that is beyond us. We are responding in the machine, and the machine is tired and exhausted.
Slowing down is not a function of speed. It is a function of awareness, and I don’t want to make awareness a mental construct. It’s a function of presence.
So, when I invite slowing down, I invite us to research and to perform research into the ancestral tentacularities that precede us. I’m asking us to touch our bodies, and touch our colonial bubbles.
I’m asking us to listen, to witness, to ‘with-ness’; to be with land, and community, and ancestor, and progeny, and children in a way that isn’t instrumental.
Activism is increasingly instrumental, meaning it’s a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. This makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which renders hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we’re trying to leave behind.
To slow down is to hack the machine, like we’re taking on other forms of body that allow us to pe*****te into different kinds of realities—other worlds.
What if rest is listening to one’s Elders? What if rest is dreaming? What if working is playing?
The university structure is one example of a colonial imposition that sees study and learning as only one thing; university tells you that if you’re not studying in some disciplinary manner, then you’re not studying. But what if having a conversation with a friend is a form of study?
Rest is decolonial in its relational entanglements with a capitalist structure. I don’t want to see it as a binary thing: rest vs. non-rest. I want to move outside that binary altogether, and create fugitive communities where rest takes on new meanings altogether. I don’t know what that is—only in the performance of it can we speak about it, and that’s just fine."
~ Bayo Akomolafe
Text source: Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times https://atmos.earth/dr-bayo-akomolafe-on-slowing-down-in-urgent-times/