Time: An essay of fragmented thoughts during the pandemic
Photo: Unsplash
I hate time. However, I have no issue with ageing - which is a common misconception people have when you say you hate time. I have no issue with wrinkles or walking instead of running, I do, however, have an issue with measurement. Time teaches us to measure ourselves. Here are a few examples:
Where were you at this time last year?
How many hours will it take you to finish that essay?
How long have you two been friends?
At what age did you lose your virginity?
How much do you weigh?
How much money did you make this year?
Now there's nothing inherently wrong with these questions. I personally detest them. My soul, however, knows nothing of time or measurement. But my soul asks the important questions.
How do you feel at this moment?
What are you learning from this class you're taking?
What is the most magical thing about your best friend?
Do you feel the deterioration of innocence inside you?
Does your body feel free?
Are you fulfilled?
It ultimately does feel like a hindrance to my life that I love the soul and hate time. I feel too many things. I feel them loudly and strongly. My sensitivity often means that the world takes my feelings and uses them as tools to slow me down, and because I hate time, I don't notice until it's too late how slow I have become. I am then left behind, alone with the world. And for a moment, it's wonderful, my soul gets to feel every mountain, river, and flower on this planet. Unfortunately, it is not long after this moment that loneliness creeps in, and yet again, I only notice once it's too late and loneliness's creepy, dark hands already have a strong grip on me. I'm now faced with the question:
Do I follow my soul into the darkness or slide my body out of the hands of loneliness, leaving my soul behind to run into the monotonous world of the ticking clock?
My hatred of time has somehow, unfortunately, left me still magnetized to it as I have lived most of my life in the hallowed halls of moratorium. The walls of moratorium always changed from alphabetized cubbies, to big kid lockers, to large windowless lecture halls filled with bodies moving quickly in and out. Recently, the gates to moratorium have been locked for our safety, and so there I was completely alone and caught waiting for my life to begin.
I have always tried as much as possible to enjoy where I am at the moment I'm in, trying not to get lost in moving forwards or backwards for fear of ending up on someone else's assembly line. This fear is rooted in my worry that my brain is not powerful enough or useful enough to even hack it on someone's assembly line. This has led me to be stuck waiting for a life that I truly want to begin. A life where sensitive, soul-loving people can live freely.
I went through all of my schooling with a great deal of challenges. I wasn't very academically inclined. Even small amounts of chaos in my home life--parents fighting, financial struggles, the typical lower, middle-class worries--made it such that I could never really focus on school. I loved learning, but it was the kind of learning that only people who live their life following pathways of their soul understand. People who live their life by watching the hands on a clock click by do not seem interested in the knowledge I was hoping to capture. I wanted to be taught what it means to be a good person--to act with kindness and help a world of people that seem to be so unhappy, so lost. Unfortunately, lessons of morality and kindness were kept out of my textbooks. This is not to say the information in my textbooks were of any less value, but it became apparent to most adults in my life at quite a young age that I was unfit to properly retain the information in those books.
The clock people tirelessly tried teaching me, but I still seemed unfit for their world, never got to school on time, or really anywhere on time, and mathematical formulas seemed to slip my mind on all my tests. I brushed this all aside by believing my life would begin once I was no longer in a system that was never meant for me, a system revolving around time.
It didn't take me long to realize that any form of success in life has to be somewhat of a balancing act between what the soul wants and what the time on the clock says. Regardless of what I'm sure was meant to be friendly advice from my 12th grade English teacher that I shouldn't attend such an academically rigorous institution like UBC, I ended up there and put myself into the world of the clocks. I tirelessly tried to be a tightrope walker, balancing interesting one-hour lectures in windowless rooms, a grading system filled with numbers that easily attach themselves to our self worth, with travel, friendship, and books by authors whose names may never appear on a syllabus. I learnt that I could walk the tightrope if I wanted to, but that the world of the clocks can never accommodate someone like me.
I feel that I am often faced with the question of following my soul into darkness or following the click-clacking clock. I usually pick darkness. I do better when I'm surrounded by the night sky, and it is often painful to feel as though few people want to meet me in the middle of the night's darkness, but those I meet there are the kindest of all people. I am often criticized by the clock-people for spending too much time reflecting on all of this, too much time in my flighty head to get anything real accomplished, and that may be true, but to the clock-people I ask, how many kind souls can you name? Because I can name countless, although I have never been great with numbers.
Now in a time of what feels like a worldwide moratorium, I realize that the clock never stops ticking, but it is up to us as to how much value we give it. Now is not the time for me to live my life differently than I normally do because there is no "normally" in my life. Whenever I have lived in the world of the clocks, I have felt numbers consuming my life.
I know that I am not "successful" in the capitalist sense of the word. And if everything that social media is telling me right now is true, I have the opportunity right now to help correct that. However, now is not going to be the moment I give into the world of the clocks where I do not belong. Now is the moment I am going to practice what I learnt from my soul.
If I was living a life that was planned to the minute, I would crumble right now as my plan would have been destroyed, but as I have always lived based only on fleeting thoughts and feelings and because of that I am able in this moment to be okay. As for the moments following - who knows? I may melt into a puddle of my own tears, but I am fortunate enough to know a few special people who will clean up my liquid state and wait with me until I'm ready to be solid again, and it is my belief that clock-people would drink me up before I would have a chance to escape.
Throughout this time of moratorium, I have felt despair, anger, love, friendship, the lack of friendship, kindness, and heartbreak. Usually, when I feel these things, I run to the mountains, or I get on a bus to a new city, a plane to a radical community or a taxi to a dance club, for obvious reasons this time means I can't do any of these things.
This has led me to replay a quote I love in my head, "[t]he only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion" (Albert Camus). I try to live my life by this quote, but what does it mean to be free when I am forced to hear the click-clacking clock torment me? I have learnt through all of this that freedom is not fixed or measurable. Freedom can't be quantified by how many rules you break, or how many social norms you disregard, freedom is not something visible to others.
In a world that runs on measurements, the most free you can be is to feel it in your soul, as the soul is the only place completely untethered to the torment of the click-clacking clock.
To feel is to disrupt time, to feel is to grow, and to feel is to rebel against a society that runs on the basis of detachment from emotion. The more detached we are, the more we mindlessly consume, the more we use numbers as a measurement of worth instead of using our hearts as a guiding tool for how we should live.
I may never fit into the world of the clock people. My attention span may be too short. I may be too sensitive, but it is my sensitivity that is my act of rebellion. I don't know what the future will look like after a pandemic like this, but for all of us stuck at home hoping for our freedom back, I think it's important to question if we were ever free to begin with?