Stop This Train

In a lot of ways, time terrifies me.

Realizing the full weight of my mortality makes me see how fragile we are as animals, and how, regardless of what we do to increase our longevity, we will all eventually die. Our heart will, after fighting to the end, cease to beat, our lungs will take that final breath, and our eyes will close for the last time. We, potentially, have a relatively long amount of time to spend on this earth; some of us go beyond 100 years! 

Still, the cruel thing about time is that it’s all a perception, and thanks to how our minds work, it goes by faster each and every day. It’s our memories that do it; the more we take in, the more our pasts are seemingly condensed. Decades seem to have passed by in mere moments, and things that seem so powerful and beloved in our hearts have come and gone in blinks. When you finally reach certain youthful landmarks, say…your first driver’s license or legally drinking alcohol, you’re elated at how you’ve finally made it and that all that “long waiting” doesn’t really seem like it took that long at all. After a certain point, however, you see all the good things that are coming to pass. Family members start to age, childhood memories gather dust on a top shelf, and suddenly the little boy you used to be is paying his own rent and nearing his college graduation. 

I know that I’m so very young and need to be excited for my life’s potential, but sometimes I just feel so very strange. What happened to waiting for new Harry Potter books? Where did the days of pretending to be a pirate at Dollywood sneak off to? When did I outgrow getting a horde of new action figures on Christmas morning? Why can’t I relive the days where the only thing I had to worry about was finishing a long division work sheet? Sometimes I just want to grab a personified passing of time, shake him, and yell “Slow the fuck down, bro!” Those memories are long gone, many 10 years plus, yet they feel like they were just a few months ago. 

It’s such a powerful burden to bear, our immune disorder to time. The same fears and anxieties that I feel now are the same that countless billions over the course of history have felt time again and again. The various religious beliefs built around easing this existential crisis. We obsess over mythological creatures fabled to transcend mortality. Those great coliseums of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China: all great testaments to the glory of their builders and the potential of humanity, now turned to legacy as the ages have come to pass. Once you stop and realize that even the most powerful, brilliant, and inspiring of people have aged and died, it puts a certain pit in your stomach. 

Although, despite all of this, once you realize that death is inevitable, you realize something else: there’s no point in being afraid. The only way to truly master death and the passing of time is not to foolishly run with no direction, but accept it, and simply live every precious day you have to it’s fullest potential. I think that’s the real trick to it, seeing the beauty in our fragility. I can only hope that by the time I take my final breath, my time here will have meant something. 

“The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”