I am fascinated with the man-made mechanism. Though I often run from its incessant ticking, instead of tangoing with its persistent rhythm. Time, an indefinite measurement which orders human lives, can be broken up into the past, the present, and the future.
They say time heals all wounds. Perhaps the best breakup drug on the market is the turning of a new calendar year. Yet the past is a dirty liar. We often remember things a lot differently from what truly happened—the memory feels hazy, though we believe it to be untouched. We tie bits and pieces together to construct a reality that occurred long ago. The feelings we once felt, vivid and all-consuming, are muted now. When I think back on the first boy to set my heart on fire, I can only feel a dull ache. And the ache only exists if I wish to bring it back—unlike in the present.
The present is a drama queen. We feel immediately and react even more immediately in the moment. Words slip from your tongue before you can even process them yourself—to put it more bluntly, we tend to do stupid shit in the present. We fight with the people we hold dear to our hearts, and consequently hurt those people. While we can escape the past and the future, we can never truly escape the present. We have to acknowledge how instantaneous our moods are in the now and combat the impulsive desire to react so we prevent negative consequences in the future.
I spend an excessive amount time thinking about the future—that glittering knob in the distance. It’s easy to fantasize about a time in our lives that hasn’t yet occurred, believing we have the power to mold the future in any way we choose. The future is untouched and so we want to be. Looking to the future has been my most effective coping mechanism to date; it holds hope and change regardless of your current situation in the present. Though we must be careful to not get lost in it either. I am currently in the future I once spent daydreaming about in high school. And yet I still continue to look to the future. If we continually spend our days looking off somewhere far away, we miss out on the precious moments right in front of us.
It's easy to blame time for life's woes, but time isn't the culprit. It never was. It mediates the span of our lives—keeps us in check. Time is your sister's fallen eyelash, the grey roots sprouting in your father's hair, the mending of a broken heart. Time does not change us; we change within the parameters of time.
