"Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away." (Marcus Aurelius)
I've always hated time. I'm forced, like everyone else, to live by the ticks and the tocks, and there never seem to be enough of them in the day. Someone told me once that the mind was able to slip in and out of the confines of time, and I've wondered if that could be right. Even at a young age, I would have loved to escape its hold. I can remember mourning my lost youth when I was eleven. It was a sad time for me; I was seeing for the first the passing of time, and of souls. I remember when my grandma died. it was Christmas time, and while my sisters and I decorated the tree that year, Dad sat in his chair watching us, and tears rolled down his face. It does something to a kid, I think, to see a rock cry.
Time's firstborn must be regret. Who hasn't been plagued by "What if I had done things differently?" "I should have called more often" "I wish I'd never said that" or "If I could only go back, I would do everything right this time"? But if we sulk in our mistakes instead of picking them up and kissing them on their faces for what they offer to teach us, going back wouldn't matter because we'd be the same people, making the same choices.
T.S. Elliot wrote:
"Footfalls echo down the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden."
It's easy to live in that place, and I've even found a sad sort of comfort in it from time to time, but that can't be what we were created for.
It's not that unusual for people to feel trapped in or bullied by time, and that can make finding happiness in the heartbeats that are happening right now difficult. Logic dictates that with each of us sensing the continuous flow of time and the slipping of our minutes, making the most of them should be second nature, or prioritized, at least. But sometimes we don't work that way. We fight it. We mourn what is lost and resent what's passed us by. We wedge ourselves between the lines of conversations, dead and gone. We agonize over tomorrow without hope and catalog yesterday without mercy. We're losing at something that was never meant to be a sport by belittling gifts that never promised us forever in the first place. Where is the happiness in this?
A friend asked me a question today. "What would you do, where would you go if you had one trip in a time machine?" I thought about historical figures that I'd like to meet, creation and invention that I'd like to witness, and lives that I would like to make better. But we can't change history. That is not why it is there.
If I could take a trip in time, I think that I would go back and watch myself growing up. Not to fix or change anything, just to watch. I saw the first robin of spring the other day and something inside me jumped up, but I couldn't remember why. I'd like to go back and watch myself at three, chewing on trees, at four, learning to skip, at five, getting on the school bus for the first time. I'd watch myself learning to ride a bike and picking flowers and twirling in dresses on the front lawn. Falling in love for the first time, my first heartbreak, sleeping with the lights on. Bee stings, nettles, marigolds and neat rows of baby carrots in the garden. I would recapture the wonder of innocence and the freedom of barefoot youth. I would remember how to be alive in and for the moment. I would make friendly with time and be happy for it. I would list and count ALL of my blessings, without chronology. I would put them in a bag, shake it up, and celebrate whatever came out... without regrets.
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