A soft caring is barely tangible, as part of the weather-change full of mercy that reaches out towards our senses and the dry earth. A slight drowsiness, just enough of it, has entered time's bloodstream as a pacesetter for the new season. If time grows weathered, and we could manage to halt its momentum, would time's face look younger there, and our lives quieter? Probably not.

Since the splitting of the atom, and alongside the industrial revolution, nothing has impacted our lives more than this. Time was never the same again. It changed conceptually. Energy became the new medium of communication and replaced the telegraph pole. It made the long hand of the clock fall off, and a new form of restlessness began to show itself …

We are delighted, enslaved, relieved! This new dynamic implies instantaneousness and availability, or a combination of the two. We barely remember the days before the cellphone, when the postman, a long-distance call, or a telegram could easily be the high point of the day or the week. Waiting has disappeared from our lives.

We lament the new disaster — time that keeps running away — without realising where and why it happened. A new generation has been born that spends the greater part of its day in the virtual world (cellphones and the internet). A world where time loses all immediate relevance and the overload of information borders on a mistreatment of the senses. The collective saturation-point spills its own toxic impact over into our thoughts, which wrestle to find a landing place for it in our subconscious — a unique anxiety arises, because the worries of the whole world are thrown on top of our own every evening at the seven o'clock news.

We cannot make time, only prioritise. Values and good relationships — especially your relationship with yourself — only become strong and whole under the watching eye of time. Moments without interruption, with safe borders that provide time with yourself to contemplate and reflect. How else do you get your disc to stop spinning?

Val du Charron has served out its own sentence faithfully under the onslaught of time — twenty-three years this month. Time is a revealer. Over twenty-three years, the character of this bearer of news has been polished to a shine and drawn nearer to the surface, where it has had to hold its shape and its content beneath the hammer of time and on the anvil of truth.

Gratitude in me has reached new levels of tenderness, thanks to this town and to its remarkable people and history. For twenty-three years Val du Charron has been able to satisfy its own hunger for value out of the overflow of this community. I have lived here myself just as long, and there has not been a single day without inspiration or a new realisation about life. Truly a modest privilege, for which I say a great thank you!

Groete Amanda Kreitzer