I have my suspicions about time.
It seems to me that we pay too much attention to time. After all, isn't it just an arbitrary concept humans have superimposed onto our species to keep the machinery flowing smoothly? We need a way to measure time, of course. We need a way to mark passages, to count our days, a method of remembering what happened when.
But the timeline of an individual has a different flow. I always expected my life to follow a certain chronology, a pattern established generations ago of where I should be at any given age. And when it didn't happen exactly according to the connect-the-dots ideas I'd absorbed throughout my life, it scared me. Where had I gone wrong? Why hadn't I secured the trappings of my age yet? Why didn't I feel twenty-five, thirty...Oh God, am I thirty already? Thoughts of failure hung around me like a tired ghost. I tossed at night. I waited for something to happen.
And something did. I threw away some of my ideas - and as Julia Cameron wrote, nothing dies harder than a bad idea. As some of those ideas finally turned to dust, my life began to take a new shape. Not the shape I'd expected, not the conventional 1 2 3 checklist, but my own red carpet through time, unfurling in front of me. As I got older, my life got younger. The things I'd least enjoyed about myself became my greatest assets.
Time, it seems, is not my enemy any longer.
Time is enriched with individual needs. Where we have that core concept of time (what time of day it is, what day it is, what year it is, keeping a schedule, etc...), a lifetime of events cannot be measured by any standard measuring tool. Every person has the ability to keep his/her own time table, and every person is subject to the rulings of the random, the rulings of fate, the rulings of the inevitable, and the rulings of some conventional timely standards.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to read your thoughts on the matter. I think your thoughts and views "On Happiness" coincide quite a bit with your thoughts and views on "Time." Maybe when we take control of our own happiness, more often than not we're taking control of our own time. Where you might still have to be to work on time, the time you spend before that moment can be stretched, relaxed, extremely superimposed or even non-existent (i.e. sleeping).
We come of age, we go of age. This is certain. No matter what humanly composed frame of reference we come up with, the truth is that we are all born and we will all pass. We all age on our stage of evolution (10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old...), but within that we need to allow ourselves leniency and embrace uncontrolled measuring.
I'm happy your life has been shaped in a new direction. The current you (the Aletha of present time) is one of great value and it should have happened in the manner in which it did. <3
Random thought: Wow... I had forgotten about my blog. Boy it's funny to read words from my past.
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