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testimonies:italy:yvyrahi

"Heterochronos in the chronotopia orchestra" - time to talk about time management

Did I had the time to write this article before? I have to admit, yes, but i didn't took it. Time management is always a big deal. If practicing music taught me one thing, is that sonetimes being early or late can be good but it have to be really exeptional and you have to be lucky, otherwise it is going to be something totaly diferent (for ex :if we redefine what is the right time) or just, most of the time, a huge collective failure because of one's mistake. When we do something together, one's time is everybody's time.

I felt during the Heterotopia tour N°3 in Sicily that nobody's was playing the same rythm, and instruments were quite untuned as well but that's not today's topic. (Oh, were we even trying to play the same song? … ). If this trip was a music band trying to play, we were all beginners and it seems that someone consciently throw away the metronome and said “ok now let's play free-jazz”. A sentence that drove me mad was “here you don't need the clock”, said by someone on the first day, when I was not there beacause I missed my plane because I did'nt woke up… how could I pretend not to need a clock when I'm capable of missing a whole fucking plane because of my weak own time management? And that's only for me, of course we where a bunch of bad-time-managing people so… y'know… shit happened. Missing the right time even doing your best is a common human mistake, everybody has to learn and will potencialy fail one of this days, that's not the problem. The problem is that many -and sometimes most of- people just doesn't give a single crap about community and everything that goes with it.

I observed it many times during the tour, I won't tell any names that's not the point and beacause everybody can be blamed on this point. To make it clear, I personnaly had the best intentions when I started the adventure and day after day I get bored. Especialy in Palermo the last five days I have to admit that I completely stoped carrying about being on time. When since the beginning there is always 30 min to wait for everybody when you arrive on time, why not to take theses minutes to enjoy the trip? That's how you get contaminated, slowed down, on the same way that a musician in a band that lose the beat make everybody fail, if you count on the others and/or the others count on you. Time is an abstract, relative notion. If everybody's time is influenced by sun, moon and earth attraction, in our scale time is directly influenced in our inside by our feelings, heart beats, adrenalin and many more ; my thoughts, reactions, sensations may be faster or slower than yours. My cultural environnement may accept more or less to be late or not ; Oh yeah we're all completely different in perceptions and lifestyle and even more than expected or accepted, so it won't work without a common mesure. Try to do a musical duet with someone who don't even know that he is trying to play in 7/4 rythm pattern when you're doing an approximative 6/8. It won't groove. Now try it with 30 people including 15 that totaly ignore rythm or juste don't care… OK. I will try to be more explicit. So, we were like an 20 people orchestra (participants) with 8 conductors (the facilitators) that didn't even tried to lead us to the same harmony (group dynamics), trying to improvise (stay free) while learning an instrument (heterotopia) and all of this without any discipline, real common mesure. Can you figure out how hard it is? Force is to admit that we need a strong discipline to succeed this kind of exercise. That's the paradoxe. You need discipline to stay free. Social experiment : Just try to take whatever musical instrument, a clarinet, a violin or drums and try to learn how to play, while improvising with 20 others people in an orchestra while following the instructions of 8 people giving you conflicting informations… the exercise will fail for the same reasons that it failed in Sicily, during the heterotopia tour n°3.

A day and a half of missed activities beacause of each one's time management, many conflicts happened during this trip. I had really great times, knew amazing people and lived wonderful moments but many aspects of what we where supposed to do totaly failed. I don't pretend having the solution but one little piece of a solution, if we are trying to do things together, there is nothing to do if everybody concerned is not doing what community need from them. It's a common problem whitche's solution is individual. Speaking there about time management but it is true on many aspects. Message to the facilitators : try at least to propose the same things to participants, you are trying to do something really hard and I have no doubt that it will finish by work so well, lot of courage and thank all of you again for proposing that kind of exercises. Message to (most of ) the participants (and to myself) : Just be there on time lazy ass, I know that you are late beacause you don't care. Doing an effort will improve your lifestyle skills, not doing an effort just make everything collapse. You're not alone.

Thanks to Sabine for giving me the idea of the title, to Josephine for helping me to put this online. Thank all of you for this experience, especially Caroline & Cecilia. Bisous

testimonies/italy/yvyrahi.txt · Last modified: 2018/11/08 18:50 by Clement