Are We Losing Ourselves To Time?
Every morning, as dawn fully unravels, I am drawn out of sleep by a familiar rhythm: the sound of irregular breathing, usually mine, feet reluctantly trudging to the bathroom, usually a house mate’s. By the time I completely gather my wits, I can clearly make out the distant clatter of early morning commuters; car horns blaring, mothers, mouthing frustrations to distracted husbands, children chatting all the way to school, and the general busyness that gives urban life its texture.
In the midst of these happenings, time soldiers on, like the wind, soft, swift and unseen, gently propelling us toward our dreams, or its practical alternatives. It is the rhythm I have come to embrace and anticipate; these predictable patterns that colour modern life. Every day I awake to its unchanged status; breakfast, bath, work, dinner, social media in between, then, bedtime. We are, mostly caught in the buzz, desperately racing through time, sweeping past deadlines and birthdays and landmarks, yet falling helplessly behind preferred schedules, incapable of the true accomplishment of triumphing over time.
Time jests. It mocks us, this thread that tethers us to the fickleness of human existence, is a constant scorn, ridiculing the futility of our rat race. We tell ourselves it will all add up, that somehow the entrapment of a desk job, rigours of bland enterprise, or the demands of economic freedom will one day concretize into something that makes it worth it in the end. Except that in the end, we all run out of time. Each day carries its own loss, as we bury the present in the graveyard of history. It is a loss we are all fated to suffer. And it is humbling and crippling to view our lives as an artistic master piece, strewn across the canvass of the universe, but for which time is slowly painting us out of the picture.
There is no going back. I will never be the same person I was ten years ago. I will never walk around with the same wide eyed wonder, or be drunk from delirious dreams. I will not seat in my University examination hall with that knowing frustration from forgetting my cases. I will never have my first kiss again, or that first experience of falling in love. The memories that define me, my joys, pains and victories, are all lost to time, captured only as vague fading memories.
As I stretch into the full stature of adulthood, I cannot help but wonder if I have squandered my youth. If I squander it still. My thoughts on the matter have wearied me to the bones, it has slowed my pace, seeped into my soul, drained me completely. Yet, time soldiers on. And so must I. So must we!
We must persist in the attempt to make some permanence of our existence, even as we continue to lose to time. And we must do this by surrendering to that inescapable human fate — death. In the end, we all run out of time. But for now, let us banish every habitual procrastination. We cannot neatly fold our thoughts and plans and store them carefully away in tomorrow. There is only one way to win this war, this race against time. And that is by leaving a part of ourselves behind. We must etch ourselves into the universe, as a memorial of the space we once occupied. We must ambitiously create that which will outlast us and consciously obliviate the potential futility of such ambition.
In the end, we run out of time, but time cannot erase our legacy. Perhaps.
