“You Dont Make Progress ,You Make Time”

I have spent over thirty years in the music industry.
And in the Western way of measuring success, the question is always the same.

Did you produce enough?
Did you stay visible?
Did you progress?

That word, progress, it is a sharp one. It cuts both ways.

On one side, yes, I have made records, performed in front of thousands, created projects that travelled further than I imagined.

But on the other side… I have sat in hospital rooms with family. I have watched my children grow beside neighbours’ children. I have stood in other countries, breathing in the strangeness of a place, having conversations that altered the way I saw the world.

By society’s clock, those things do not “count.”
They are not progress.
They are not productivity.

But they are what I remember.
They are what has shaped me.
They are what lasts.

African philosopher John Mbiti once wrote that in many African societies, the future does not really exist.
Time is not a line stretching forward.
Time is made of events.
A year is not 365 days, it is two wet seasons and two dry seasons.
A conversation, a ritual, a song, these are what create time.

And when an event passes, it flows into the vast memory of the past, the zamani, where it lives forever.

By this measure, every meaningful encounter, every song sung with soul, every gathering with friends and family, that is the real progress.
Not forward.
But deeper.

And here is where the voice matters.

Because a voice carries an event into memory.
When you sing to your child, or raise your voice in ritual, or simply let yourself speak from the heart in a room full of strangers, you amplify time.
You mark it.
You give it a weight that no clock can measure.

You do not make progress.
You make time.
And your voice is the instrument that makes it ring.

So maybe the question is not “have I succeeded?”
Maybe the question is: what am I remembering, what am I voicing, and what will live on in the memory of others?

Because that is the only kind of time that counts.

This is the heart of what we explore in Shiftfolk how presence, story, and voice can help us shape time differently, and live lives that echo far beyond the clock.