Time Will Tell
True confession: I’m lousy at keeping time. As a kid, I routinely missed buses, and arrived late for class. I was also usually the last one to exit the schoolyard at recess, and the student left behind at the community pool following swimming lessons for having taken too long to dry my hair. My Grade 4 teacher bawled me out. But it scarcely made a difference. As the years progressed, I could be counted on to arrive beyond fashionably late 
at parties and to miss the opening scenes of movies that I’d then have to watch all over again, to ensure I had grasped the plot. It’s not that I thought time irrelevant. I just regarded it as something fluid, and open to interpretation. Why am I telling you all this? Because time – how we think about it and also use it to give structure to our lives – ticks throughout the Winter 2023 issue of The York University Magazine, uniting an array of articles about alumni accomplishment in such wide-ranging fields as science, sports and the arts. Included are stories on how York astronomers are able to predict the age of the universe with greater accuracy than before, and on why University graduates involved in the growing discipline of sleep medicine say that a good night’s rest depends on maintaining the circadian rhythms established by the body’s inner clock with a consistent sleep schedule. The cover story on former York visual arts student Ekow Nimako is also time-sensitive, but in a different way. His fantastical sculptures, made from pieces of black LEGO, are informed by Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic and philosophy in which past, present and future commingle in speculative works of art combining elements of Black history and science fiction. Nimako’s perception of time is dynamic, poetic and multidimensional. It aligns with my own belief that time isn’t rigid. Rather, as the stories in this issue collectively suggest, time fluctuates with the seasons and lingers for an eternity among the stars, awaiting to be discovered. Given that punctuality isn’t one of my strong suits, I like the idea of time being a journey, as opposed to a destination. It makes me think I’ve all the time in the world to get to where I need to go in the end, without missing the plot. ■