I have been thinking a lot about time.
Seems like a strange thing to ponder as someone who is neither a philosopher nor an existentialist (and also as someone who should really be thinking about the tension between Europe and America in Nabokov's "Lolita" #procrastination).
But it has recently struck me that I am almost a second semester sophomore, and that the kids a year younger than me, who I will eternally remember as high-schoolers, will soon be halfway through their first year of college. Where has all the time gone? And what have I been doing while it passed? Because I feel as though time is chasing me through the maze of life and will soon pass me by entirely.
I mentioned to my roommate the other day that we, as humans in the modern age, make the mistake of viewing our lives as a series of benchmarks. Seven days until this. Two months until I get to do that. When we set these pointless deadlines for ourselves, the interim is spent anticipating this next "great" moment. And when we finally reach these benchmarks, we look back and realize that seven days or two months have gone by and that we've barely taken time to notice.
And then I wondered, why set these benchmarks? Why do we feel the need to live our lives in anticipation of the next break, the next holiday, the next big thing? I realized the answer might lie with what we do in the meantime, what we do while waiting.
The reason we look forward so much might be because we are not entirely thrilled with how we spend the rest of our time. We don't look at our every day, we look past them. We don't find enough passion in the tasks we perform daily, we don't take interest in the small things that make up our time, so we remind ourselves that there are only X days before we can do something we anticipate enjoying.
Sadly, as a college student who doesn't really choose to write the essays, take the exams, and complete the other busy work I am assigned (though I did choose to be here, so you can argue against this point), I can't do much to make every day a complete enjoyment, but I can do little things. I can write, I can sing, I can teach myself how to play guitar; I can spend time with my friends and squeeze in a few laughs, so that I may have reasons to look forward to every day and not just reasons to glance over pieces of my life.
In the future, I hope that I will find a job that will thrill me and new, exciting people who will continue to make my every day worth extending. I guess that's what they say all this college work is for...
But for now, it still puzzles me why each day we live feels so long, but come the end of the week, I can't help but exclaim, "Wow, that week went fast!" Or come December 25th, we all remark, "I feel as though it was just Christmas!"
Time moves at the same, steady pace, whether we want it to or not. It does not move backwards, it does not pause, and so we should all learn to spend our time wisely. Fill your days with things you enjoy doing in the moment, not with things that provoke you to look forward, beyond them. This is hard to do, and yes, I'm likely being hypocritical, but this is something I'm trying to learn myself.
Not a single second of life can be stopped from ticking into the past. So make each one count, but don't count them down.
