Life’s felt as if it’s been going by a bit too quickly. I close one eye and open the other, and suddenly it’s next Thursday, and I’m making coffee in my kitchen wearing ill-fitting sweatpants.
I can only describe this feeling as floating through space. I find that it’s easy to get lost in this floaty period of time, almost like staring at yourself in the mirror for too long. The minutes and hours feel as though they skip around during those moments.
Time doesn’t seem to exist. If it does, it acts on its own terms, appearing and disappearing when it pleases, slowing down and speeding up when it feels like doing so, no longer a unit to measure one’s life.
I think back at the start of the pandemic. In Toronto, lockdowns started in March 2020, my college, like others, stopped in person classes and decided to conduct things as normal online. I remember the drag of the following few months. Time sort of stopped to catch up with itself. Life was so busy that it didn’t notice just how fast time was passing by.
The realization of time is one I have a love/hate relationship with. On one hand, I believe it’s always a good thing to remember one’s own mortality, that you’re a finite being. On the other hand, the focused clarity that hits at 4pm when washing dishes isn’t always a pleasant experience.
Knowing that time forever ticks on and that the only guarantee in life is the end of it, can spiral into existential crisis. Death is a topic I dread because the acknowledgement of this permanent end is frightening.
Humans are a species of experience, death is the door to the unknown. Those who are religious or spiritual, believe in a form of afterlife. Atheists generally don’t. Both sides, however, live life with an anxiety towards reaching the answer. The only way to find out is to die, and obviously you can’t share your discoveries after the fact.
The thought of what can come after can either be hopeful or nauseating. What if one lived a life of poor ethics and constantly found betterment in the pain of others? Well that person, if there is an afterlife, won’t have such a pleasant experience. And what if one lived a moral, ethically sound life? Then the afterlife will be one of satisfaction. It goes without saying that if there isn’t an afterlife, then the two parties will only live on in the memories of loved ones instead of becoming a travelling soul.
I think that if one takes life for what it is, a chain of happenings stringed together by acts of fate, then life becomes more bearable. One should be aware that the various happenings of life are done as acts of fate. Walking is a deep act of fate, for one doesn’t know if the floor will crumble beneath them.
But I digress. When time does stop, deep in thought as a jazz trumpet’s whine swings through the air, life flashes from moment to moment. Opening one’s eyes to the rifts of space in between brings a deep melancholy.
There are moments that would be better off on fast-forward, the awkward first encounter or waiting for a sauce to thicken.
Time works for its benefit and humanity’s patience. When one is patient with the way time flows, they can find themselves flowing with it, they become the piano to the trumpets cries. But when one lives life in a rush, the whole gig falls flat on its face, time continues as the impatient tries to find a reflection in boiling water.
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