May 30, 2021 at 11:01AMThe Mayan worldview today embodies Time. Time is not an abstraction, but an entity. A person. The Mayan Calendar carries that relationship into the 20 archetypes and the 13 tones used to describe how Time is feeling on any given day. So when I heard Luis Mojica ask, “Is my body a relative or is my body a resource?” I could completely relate. Relative or resource can be applied to many areas of our decolonial life. In my work on decolonizing Time, this inquiry gets to the heart of our relationship to Time and Flow. Flow is our birthright. Flow is a state of being that enabled early humans to have focus in finding food. It’s why we are alive today. It is an incredible gift of focus and creativity that evolved into how we created “bodies of culture.” (h/t @ResmaaMenakem) And, here’s the rub… Flow has been proven by neuroscience to help people be more productive (h/t to my Flow mentor @StevenKotler). Flow has been weaponized by capitalism. Flow has become a tool of modernity and capitalism to extract productivity from humans and the planet to further “outsource entropy.” (h/t to Tyson Yunkaporta for that delicious term.) See the conundrum? When we believe what capitalism has trained into us, we treat Time as a resource not a relative. We are good little cogs in the industrial machine that consumes our future. That is, Time is being stolen (h/t Dr. Brittany Cooper). But that theft comes at the expense of our bodies, our lineage, our relations of the future. When we push ourselves for productivity’s sake, we are borrowing resources from our future body, outsourcing entropy. We are indebting ourselves. The System of Productivity knows this. It’s an institutionalized system of executive leadership, management, policies and procedures for extraction. A systemic problem. And since Flow begets creativity, creativity begets culture, and culture is a no-no in white supremacy, Flow had to be re-imagined as a tool for extractive capitalism. But we can reclaim our Time and creative Flow to dream a better world. We can liberate our Flow from that broken system. Un-leadership. Moving us toward relationship and how we’ve been initiated by the planet and Time. (Cont)