I need to make friends with time. I was thinking this as I left the house, how quickly the summer has gone, how quickly this life is going, the bits I love and even now the bits I don’t love so much don’t seem to drag so much as they did when I was young. The whole thing has speeded up, as is the cry of everyone over whatever age it is when summers do not go on forever. I need to make friends with time, this out of control aspect that drives us, that consumes me. It’s happening after all. It’s with me all the time. And that’s the thing - all the time - this is how I’ve come to understand it. I made the mistake once of saying to my sister time doesn’t exist. What I meant was, as you perceive it but it was lost in a shower of ridicule, such an easy stab. What I mean is that time as I know it is a block through which I move, it’s not time that moves at all but me, the space that is me. And for some reason that I’m sure someone reading this will explain, as I get older I experience my travel speed up. But time itself hasn’t done a thing, it’s not responsible for this feeling, it, as Ian Banks observed when a character looked into the eyes of the universe, has no emotion. All of my yesterdays and all of my tomorrows are co-existing, these echoes of me can, in certain lights, be seen in that tracing paper plane. But my attachment, oh boy that’s the trouble, that’s why it’s so hard to be friends. Not wanting moments to end, thinking time’s a thief, has it in for me, unable to fathom that time doesn’t know I exist let alone know my name, that more love and beauty are right around the corner. I have this when I leave the house, too frightened to presume I’ll be back again in case my presumption thwarts me. As if time were vindictive I say goodbye as if it were forever. As I was leaving I saw the angel. I said, how you doing? and it replied, just preparing for your death. This shook me - you can imagine - until it explained each change is a death to the greater spheres, it’s no big deal, just stepping through a doorway. And one day when I’m a hundred and one I will die in the way we know it and that moment exists already as clearly as this one, on the Eurostar, leaving Paris for London. And I am walking back into the house in winter in France, a ten day sortie in December. That exists too.
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No one here has to explain it. You just did. Perfectly.
Living in the moment,
Steve
Yes, you were thinking about it. And then you added to it.