Penny Post #8: Time
Time slows down when you are desperate for it to speed up.
I understand the irony of this post as published on Easter Sunday. If you celebrate, know this was written several weeks ago & please keep reading…
We are ruled by time. It is a simple yet unavoidable truth of our existence. We mark each year with the passing of our time on this Earth.
I recently celebrated twenty-two years of time spent on Earth. I’m preparing to celebrate four years of studying at an institution that is bidding me adieu. I’m struggling to know how much time it might take for me to move cross country.
I’m ready to leave this place. I’m ready to start anew. I’m ready to build my own life, yet I will never be able to escape time.
I often remark on how fast time goes. It seems that the older I get, the faster it goes. But maybe it only seems to go faster because I’m more aware of time’s presence. Because I’m more aware of how much time has passed since I began. Because I’m more aware of the ticking clock indicating when my time is up.
Yet this is untrue. I cannot continue with this morbid thought - that whenever I think of time I think of death - because time slows down the more I’m aware of it. The more I count the minutes, the hours, the days, the slower time seems to go. In this case, the more aware I am of time passing, the slower it actually passes.
Maybe it is because this feeling is paired with anxious anticipation. I’m most aware of time when I’m counting down the time until something in the future. 1 month, 5 days, 7 hours, 49 minutes…
You better bet that one month five days seven hours and forty-nine minutes is going to clamber on. Does the time slow down because I’m anticipating something held by a future time or does time slow down because I’ve said hello to it, allowed it space in my mind, and continually check up on it?
Even funnier, sometimes when I reflect on my past, things feel as if they happened “just yesterday” while other things feel as if a million years away. And the space at which it feels from me changes depending on the day. As you know, I’ve done quite a bit of reflecting within the space of this newsletter. From Santa Claus to my first pet, I’ve looked back on my earlier moments and attempted to derive meaning from them. I’ve done my best. But more than that, these moments have felt supremely closer to the present Kiera then they once did. I’ve reconstructed the story in my mind by writing it, and thus the moment feels as if it happened just yesterday instead of more than a decade ago.
We are ruled by time, yet we don’t quite understand it. There doesn’t seem to be a reliable causative relationship. I want to understand time so I can pack it away as understood; I want to understand my relationship to time so I don’t have to consciously think of how I might have to interact with it. Time speeds up and time slows down regardless of our attention to it yet time speeds up and time slows down in response to our attention.
Marcus Aurelius, in his spectacular Meditations, writes:
“It is a vulgar, but still a useful help towards contempt of death, to pass in review those who have tenaciously stuck to life. What more then have they gained than those who have died early? Certainly they lie in their tombs somewhere at last, Cadicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or any one else like them, who have carried out many to be buried, and then were carried on themselves. Altogether the interval is small [between birth and death]; and consider how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?”
Perhaps this seems like a fairly nihilistic viewpoint - to “not consider life a thing of any value” - but I instead point your attention to the end remarks: “For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space”. I may kick the dead horse of my time endlessly within this essay, but what I have not touched on, what I’m scared to even put into perspective, is the time that was before me and the time that will inevitably come after me. Both infinities which I will not be a part of.
A no lesser philosopher by the name of John Green writes:
“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
Some infinities are greater than other infinities. My infinity - at this point just twenty two years - is perhaps smaller than the infinity before my twenty two years and the infinity after my allotment of years, but it still is an infinity.
Time might slow down for me, yet doesn’t slow down for you although we are experiencing the same moment in time. What a strange thought. Something we are both affected by; something that draws lines on our faces just the same, something that pulls our skin toward the Earth, something that weakens our eyesight; something that we experience the sameness of with each passing day is also something we experience the difference of with each passing day.
As I wrote before: I’m restless to graduate. Like, buying storage boxes at Walmart and scrolling Zillow for apartments, restless. This restlessness and the concurrent slowing of time is not similarly felt by my other senior friends who are savoring the moments we have left. There is a sense that we are approaching time differently: I am willing it to pass and others are willing it to stay. The same “time” that we are experiencing is felt profoundly differently. Is this because the people who are experiencing the time are profoundly different or is it instead because time is a force semi-malleable, willing to be mutated by the soul at which it carries?
And aren’t our most pleasurable moments when we lose track of time, when we forget it exists? When I’m sitting through a boring lecture, I’m constantly checking the clock. Yet when I’m writing or reading, I could go hours without checking it. I forget that minutes are passing, that hours are passing because I’m so immersed in the activity itself. I go numb to time which is how I know that these activities are my most life-giving.
In this essay, I’ve attempted to derive meaning from the un-deriveable force of time, but in my derivation I’ve probably muddied it even more. What I can walk away with, however, is that time is mysterious, and I will never stop trying to understand it. Maybe it is mutable, maybe it changes with each soul that carries it, maybe it is meaningless and I should just accept my small infinity and move on, maybe I should try to lose track of it more often.
At the very least, time’s up for this essay. See you next week.
Questions I leave you with:
What is your relationship to time?
How has your relationship to time changed as you’ve passed through it?
What are you wanting time to do right now?