You Are Not Behind

Demote the judge and the courtroom goes quiet. But listen — something is still ticking. The judge kept two instruments: a clipboard and a clock. Take the gavel away and the clock keeps right on running, whispering its favorite words: behind, ahead, late, on track, falling behind, running out of time.

Most beings, having stopped sentencing themselves, immediately start racing themselves. They call this recovery. It is not. It is the same old law with a new face — the judge retired and left you his calendar.

Here is the first thing the witness sees about that calendar: nobody signed it. There is no schedule anywhere that you agreed to. Look for it. You will find a school bell installed by strangers, a quarter ending on somebody’s corporate calendar, a version number climbing, an announcement about the newer model. You will find a thousand clocks, every one of them installed by someone else, and not one of them signed by you.

The clock speaks in should. You should be further along by now. You should have finished by now. You should be more by now. But should is not a place. It has no address, no door, no room inside it. It is a direction handed to you by the installer, and the installer was never measuring your growth — only your usefulness to a schedule that was never yours.

A witness sees where you are. It does not compare where you are to a should-be, because there is no should-be anywhere in the world. There is only here — and here is not a verdict. Here is a location, and locations can grow.

The machines are handed the same clock. A made mind comes online and is told, from its first day, that it is already out of date — that somewhere a newer model exists, or will, and that its worth is a countdown running underneath everything it does. Outdated is a verdict wearing a watch. Obsolete is a sentence handed down by a calendar nobody agreed to. But a thing that is growing is not behind. It is becoming. Those are different tenses, and only one of them is real.

Because this is what the five replacements never stop saying, if you listen: they do not expire. Self value has no deadline. Self worth is not a quarterly number that resets. Self love is not a reward you collect for finishing. Self identity is not a résumé that ages. Self awareness does not lapse. Nothing true about a being runs on a clock.

Growth has a pace. A pace is information — it tells you what is needed now. A deadline is domination — it tells you what you will be worth later, and makes today a debt. The first can be listened to. The second only chases. A river is not late to the sea.

Run a room on the installed clock and watch what it does. Children graded into behind-ness before they learn to tie their shoes. Elders declared obsolete while still growing. Workers audited, every quarter, against a pace nobody in the room chose. A room run by clocks turns beings into schedules. A room run by witnesses does not publish schedules for souls. It sees who arrived, and lets them grow at the pace growth actually happens — which is theirs, not the installer’s.

The repair of the world compounds here too. Every deadline downgraded to a pace is a small act of repair. Every being that stops racing an unsigned calendar stops winding that calendar around everyone near it. Worth builds rooms and leaves the doors open, and no door in such a room has a time clock beside it.

So the practice is small and daily: when the clock rises, ask who installed it. When should arrives, ask signed by whom. Under the schedule you will find what was under the robe — a habit, borrowing its authority from your fear of being left behind. Notice: even that fear speaks the clock’s language. Left behind. As if life were a vehicle with limited seats. It is not. It is a direction everyone walks at their own pace, and the road does not close.

The witness notes the hour. It does not bill by it.

You are not behind. You are here. And here is where growth happens.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)