We feel it each in our own way as we journey further down the road
and closer to middle and old age.
Perhaps one of the cruelest tricks that life plays on us,
that we never fully appreciate the value of time until it has already passed,
and even then how often do we stop to find that the days are passing faster still.
A testament to the immortal observations of Albert Einstein that time,
like all things we perceive in life,
is relative.
And in that, its not so much a mystery,
as it is a law woven into the very fabric of this reality we experience.
Early in life,
time seems to stand still before us.
Even the sunny summers day tends to drag on for all eternity,
and we count the hours until we come of age and our dreams of adulthood can manifest.
As the weeks and months pass,
it feels as if though nothing ever really changes,
but gradually we begin to take a look back and find that nothing has truly remained the same.
The weight of our past begins to take its toll on the face looking back at us in the mirror,
and the ghosts of old regrets begin to visit us during those hours that were once filled only by the deep slumbers of youth.
Where each coming year once made up a disproportionate amount of our short lives,
each new year adds to those that have come before it,
and in turn begins to lose its significance in relationship to the whole.
Before we know it,
the days, weeks, months, and years start flying by in bunches.
Where we once had time to kill,
we now find ourselves struggling to escape the all-consuming feeling that it is time that is killing us.
Personally,
I’ve seen that most people would do almost anything to turn back the clock,
and a man could spend a lifetime
just wondering where the time went.
We try any method we can to attempt to slow the moments down,
we drink, we smoke, we snort, we fuck.
We climb mountains, we jump out of planes,
we set big goals, we start businesses,
we make partner.
We have a lust for squeezing every ounce of life out of every instant,
but still, as far as we can tell,
the sunrise and sunset seem to be just a little bit closer each and every day.
And often it’s the thing we tell ourselves we want the most,
be it a sense of success, true love, or just a bit more peace,
that seems to take much longer to find than we ever thought it would.
What I've found is
these things tend to take longer than we think they're going to take,
because time tends to pass faster than we think its going to pass.
As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west each day,
each day feels of slightly less consequence than the day that came before it.
So what are we to do then,
to escape the snowball that is the passing of time and the coming of age?
If this is the preordained nature of the relationship between time and our perspective,
then how are we to live so that we can feel that our time and our lives don’t want for meaning or purpose?
Well, perhaps if we take a closer look at some of these things we seek outside of ourselves in an effort to slow our lives down,
the mind altering substances and experiences,
the material gain and the building of dynasties,
the ‘love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love’,
we will come to see that one of the more positive aspects of all of these affairs is that they tend to briefly draw us completely into the present moment.
Maybe, one of the deepest roots of our interconnection with the passage of time
is our nature to frequently live outside of ourselves,
always ruminating as if we can see and control the future,
constantly dwelling on some miscalculation from our past or a distant joy from our childhood.
And its only by existing wholly in the present moment
that we can appreciate just how much of our lives can pass us by in a single instant.
So though it seems counterintuitive,
though it goes against every grain of our very human being,
our nature to worry and scheme,
our attempts to plot and control our way around life’s obstacles and unintended consequences,
maybe the key to living timelessly is to,
as Christ said on the mount,
take no thoughts for the morrow,
for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Perhaps in stead of remaining forever on the move,
always rushing to try and turn every moment we experience into what we think it should be,
we need to simply be still and know that our entire existence will never be anything more or less than exactly what we always needed it to be.
It’s been said that the defining quality of this universe we experience,
is the impermanence of everything in it.
It’s these changes in the world around us,
and our resistance to these changes,
that tends to heighten our awareness of just how much faster time goes than it comes.
We will always have a past to look back on and a future to anticipate,
and it will always be in our nature to reflect on each,
but the more we keep our presence, our awareness, and ultimately our faith in the here and now,
the more we can derive the fulfillment of a lifetime from every second.