Mr. Dash is taking a 21-hour train ride from Moshi back to Dar es Salaam. That is all I know.
Well, I know a little bit more. I know he got stuck in Tanzania during his well-deserved break from work at African Leadership Academy.
On his way home he tested positive, or rather did not test negative, and so was not allowed to fly. That led to an impromptu and extended vacation which included a journey to Moshi.
From speakers, the train station (pictured) plays music: “Jazz,” Mr. Dash says, “which Spotify does not recognize.”
I am tempted to say, “you see, there are still parts of the world original and distinct, over which the grid of technology has not yet descended.”
But I think the opposite is the point. Whatever the music was, it will be uploaded soon enough. Mr. Dash caught a rarity, like pulling a soon to be extinct fish into your boat.
A future that might use technology to promote slow living is a subject I have touched on a few times in this space because the disease of an economy based on “more” and “faster” has been eating away at us for any number of decades, if not centuries. We have grown accustomed to caring about what machines can and cannot do rather than caring about how people live, people like ourselves. Bezos? Branson? Men who think they deserve rocket ships and that this is the model? They are idiots. We need a way all of us can work down the small track of our own lives, each in our own way. And this begins by using our tools well rather than mimicking those tools with the most power.
But that messy subject is for some other day. For as you will note, the station knows what we should do today, and all days like it.