Time???
Time???
Oh sweet, beautiful time. Do I resent you with my tongue sticking out wide or do I embrace you like the hug that I have been yearning for? Oh sweet, wide space. Do I appreciate your emptiness or do I pack it with shelves to fill them with boxes? And then where do I become myself? When my face relaxes and my arms wrap around the warmth of a body? Or when the boxes are full and when the space is emptied?
Recently I have been thinking a lot about age. Recently age has become more inconsequential to me. Maybe because I have become more observant: Quantifiably, age is a simple repetition. A repetition of life. A repetition of yearly time. But now that I am older than before and I enter adulthood it feels like before me lays the longest of times; a spiral of decades that foresee the foreseeable; the most of times. Maybe it’s my own nihilistic disillusionment of becoming a young adult and to not find it different from a blurry vision of a never ending future. A little bit of nihilism is liberating. So it has been liberating to realize how young I am in comparison to all age. The older I grow the less I learn to make things bout me; I have learned to distance myself and I have learned me. The past years I have spent responsibly regulating and working towards a degree and accomplishments. Now I step beyond the frame of young adulthood and the plane fields in front of me feel like a return to youth. Blades of grass swaying in the wind; a blue sky over the dust bowl. I guess a thing that defines youth is that there is so much emptiness next to all fulfillment; necessary space for all the life yet to live. I’m convinced I only crave simple things to be happy but knowing the time I haven’t lived yet is coming towards me, keeps me yearning to fill it. The momentary panic that comes over me. Consistently incomplete. Incomplete in repitions of time.
The future is my enemy because it comes with endless possibilities. But I am not one for probabilities - if any possibility is just a previously calculated potential outcome, then we can all say we know what the future brings, when we all know that we simply cannot tell the future, nor risk, and maybe not even potential. It is a bitter twist in a sweet life. It is the gift of the present to be around. So privileged, so happy, so moving. I know that I am happy on a Saturday evening having a beer with friends. I am more by myself than ever before. But the thought that I can’t let go, is that every time I have thought I am most myself, I wasn’t even myself yet, like I am myself now.
Sometimes I like to think about sand kernels. Like peeling to the skin - soothingly - I think it is a beautiful metaphor in life, that sharp, angular sand is best used for construction (because it binds better). Smooth, well-rounded sand is only found in desserts, where winds shape them in isolation. It is for this reason that there is a sand shortage; most sand simply cannot be used for building. Like most water cannot be used for drinking. There is a paradox in what we have and what we can use. If we treat sand like sand and water like water, then we might think there is a lot of it, but if we start to compare within and we start to compare with intent, we realize its bounded in infinity. What are the characteristics of infinities? What can we leave unknown? And if a year is a bounded infinity like the space between 0 and 1, then what infinities do we create for ourselves and isn’t it then absouletly normal to be overwhelmed its endlessness? There is no risk in repetition, only different outcomes and different times. Then age is just the repetition of yearly time and age a bounded infinity in the repetition of life.