Part 1 – Common Enemy #1: Time
Wouldn’t it be nice to start over? That silly mistake, that one failed test, that rejection – forgotten words and unsaid things or words that came out wrong that you can never take back. Sometimes we think it would be nice to have a time machine and go back and do it all over again. Sometimes I imagine that there is another version of myself in a parallel universe who did it differently. Where is that person now? How did their life turn out? Was that choice, that moment; can it possibly affect our whole life?
Those thoughts eat at me, coupled with an anxiety for the uncontrollable fate of the future. However recently I started to realize that maybe the only reason I feel that way is due to time.
If time didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be thinking of the future or the past but rather would just exist in the present.
What is time? OK, of course we know the definition that is in the dictionary and also Einstein’s theories and of course the never ending tick tock of a clock, counting down the day – having us begging for more. We flip through calendars day by day, and ring the New Year’s bell every year. Time is all around us, 24/7. We wait for the clock to count down our work day and log in our seconds for dollars. We sing happy birthdays as every year goes by around the sun. We measure the speed of our runs and the distance we travel by the seconds that count down as wait in traffic.
Time is everywhere. It can be seen as a currency, a payment to the universe to live the human experience. And it seemingly only moves forward. Even if you do not move, it counts down, one second at a time.
Enter existential crisis – we start asking ourselves, are we spending our time wisely? We start comparing ourselves to other people, seeing people do amazing things at a quicker pace than we ever can. We start to feel time take a toll on our bodies, wearing out our joints and organs. We start looking at calendars that show us how many days we have left. If an average expectancy is 77 years… How much time do we have left? This dread and this fundamental law of the universe unfortunately made us become a regretful wannabe perfectionist admittingly. Since we have so little time, we wish for everything to be done perfectly and as best as possible so that we can use our time wisely.
But lately I have been ignoring time. I have been learning how to be free from the clutches of this device. Maybe time isn’t as scary after all… and as cliche as it sounds, I have been learning to live in the present… Read more in Part 2.