General relativity

Time has turned ferocious and I can’t for the life of it, attempt to slow it down.

I am guessing it has always been fast. But I suppose, when one is younger,one tends to think there is always the second half. And now when I am in the second half, I wished I had played better. It isn’t regret of but rather a plea. It is a desperate attempt to remember if I ever was able to comprehend how a day went by.

Does it happen to you as well? Your alarm does a good job of ringing wild at 06:30 in the morning. Through your groggy eyes you register that fact but when you do swing off the bed and toss away the warm comforter, the clock moves at least 17 minutes ahead. This disappearance of time happens all throughout day. You walk from the car parking lot to your desk and it is already 08:00. You feel guilty to get yourself a cup of coffee until you barricade yourself with tasks and emails that hound from the day before. Unread emails in bold in your work account represent tasks, notifications, reminders, great opportunities and spam. You have activated preview but that hardly sheds a light. By the time you are prepped for the first meeting, you feel lucky that you have only lost a few hours until then. At 12:00 you think of lunch and there after you think of what you should have achieved before lunch. Time gaps later that day leave you flummoxed as you make your way back to your white BMW, your love, your shelter and your respite. And you drive back home asking serious questions.

In those ten hours when did you find time to be great? When did you exactly grow as a person? And how many minutes did you bank in your account of achieving your goals. You find the answers to those questions difficult. But you come home positive, thinking it could only get better. You head out again for a run, or to your badminton club. You come home exhausted and bustle up some dinner. You then watch nonsensical TV as if it would paradoxically make sense of the day. You want to start fresh but you always end up going late to bed, thinking at least you managed to maximize the evening.

It is painful this ferocity of time. Important and significant events are happening all around me. I am headed towards a change of status but I can’t seem to give it enough time to reckon what that means. I lose time watch TED videos that tell me not to waste time watching videos on your iPad in bed. At times, I do ask myself where I am running to. Would this constant evaluation of time lost be consequential in the bigger scheme of things? Or that this is as big as it ever was going to get.

I am not upset. I am not elated. I am terrified. Underachieved weeks are punctuated with haircuts and cutting my nails. The repeatability is dampening the irregularity of lives and finiteness of our time on this glorious planet. The black and white of clock dials on a train platform Germany is a ticking reminder each time. Time is clear in its count. I just scale it conveniently.

How many days in a year can I actually even remember? I am not losing minutes. I am losing eternities to chores and regularity. It isn’t that I need to slow down to smell the flowers. I am already slow enough. I just do not smell it hard enough.

There is way out I think. It would need to fill these lost minutes of my day with an annoying sense of persistence. If I am not using every instant of that time in the pursuit of what I define then I wouldn’t have anyone to blame. 

It wouldn’t be a matter of relativity but of absolute certainty. It would be a matter of time.