If the passage of time has taught me one thing, is that time does not exist.
It’s a shadow of something that might be real, but is probably not.
It’s the imagination working overtime to capture something that cannot be caught.
Time is Moby Dick, swimming the vast oceans, horizon-less, effortless.
And we are but feeble captains with spears in hand, ready to destroy what is beautiful and mysterious.
We find ways to rationalize it;Birthdays, holidays, decades, centuries, big hands, little hands.
It isn’t there. The young are old, and the old couldn’t be any younger. Wrinkles are nothing but tucks and folds harboring memories and experience.
Time is nothing more than a measuring instrument, go figure; meters, miles, kilometers, feet, centimeters, millimeters, pounds, kilograms and then finally, hours, minutes, seconds.
All we really have is right now. This moment. Suspended in the air like a spider from it’s web, patient, graceful, and then it’s gone. Forever. But not really.
But before you realize that it’s gone, before you can sob or mourn, or scoff, or sneer, or sulk. You have a new muse, a new spider, hanging from a different, shiny new web.
Another opportunity, a fresh new start, a clean slate, a lifetime, a playground. You are a child, and this moment is your favorite, shiny new toy.
And so the artist sits down with a fresh lump of clay, and he will mold until his hands are calloused and his imagination parched.
In this moment, you can reinvent, you can redefine, you can relive.
Or sit and wait, as of course, everyone believes that you have to give everything its due time, to sink in, to realize.
Hypocrisy at its best. People say two things all the time. They say “Give it time” and they say “One life to live, live it” some even throw in “why do tomorrow what you can do today” for good measure.
Yet they are stuck in apathy, they wait it out. They don’t love because love needs time to grow, when everything they consist of scream to love, their souls bellow out from the gallows like a bewildered banshee.
“Reach out, love, share!”
“This is amazing, I am alive”
“This is refreshing, water after the drought”
“This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life, the moment that lingers long after I am gone”
“Run with this, this is the best you have ever had”
And then the subtle whisper of rationality drowns it out, a bitter old man wheezing through an oxygen mask, the last sigh of the curmudgeon, a final push, weak and powerless, yet it holds sway over who and what you are.
“This is not love, this is chemical imbalance.”
“This is not love, this is a bad choice”
“This is not love, this is you making a fool of yourself”
“Give it time, give it time, give it time, time will lift the veil and reveal this for what it truly is.”
“Do not give into this, fight it, slay the last unicorn”
This is a very hard thing to do. Letting go of the concept of time entirely, and follow that internal compass we are all equipped with when we leap into existence. Kicking, screaming, full of life.
We must live from the inside out. Not the other way around.
I am blind. I feel my way through life. And through these blind eyes, I could not see more clearly, and I assure you there are no horizons in sight. Boundaries are just as fabled as time is.
And you, 20/20, stare at me through dull eyes. And yet, you have no idea who I am.
Could I possibly be all those things that I appear to be? Could anything really?
And so the boy sits by the pool, dipping his toes in periodically, always telling himself that if he waits long enough, the water will get warmer, and when it’s just right, he will dive in.
Before long, his toes don’t reach the surface of the water. The water evaporates. The pool is empty, all the other boys are gone, much like the water. The boy puts his head in hands and sobs accordingly.
But hey, it’s only been a minute, give it time, you might be able to justify what it is that stirs inside when you see me or anyone / anything else. You might be able to get that perfect temperature if you just wait it out. If you don’t evaporate first.
All we have is time, all we have is endless numbered days.
