Time laughs on

Time is not our friend. When we’re young, we have all the time in the world. But as the years tick by, you realise this was never true. None of us have time. Time has us. It toys with us. It runs from us. No one knows how much time they have to use, but you best believe we’ll all waste it.

If clocks and calendars, sundials and hourglasses, had never been invented, would we have such an existential problem with time?

For time doesn’t exist, and yet it controls all of us. We are its puppets, time the evil puppeteer. We’re soldiers marching to oblivion. Blinded by lies and fickle hope that if we’re good little soldiers, we’ll be rewarded.

I ask you: what is the reward?

Use time well, serve your time, and what will happen? You’ll be happy? Happiness isn’t and can’t be the result of time well spent over a lifetime. It can only be the feeling one has during the borrowing of time in that moment.

The present is all that exists. The past is just mixed up, edited memories. The future something we can never grasp, like whispers of smoke ever out of reach. The present moment, ever shifting, is all we have. Yet none of us reside here.

Oh no, we lie anxiously in the bosom of the past, suckling at its blackened, poisonous teet. We want the past to sustain us, all the rose-tinted memories we never want to forget, or the horrible unchangeable memories that we think we can rewrite, if only we go over it one more time.

Then there’s those on the treadmill racing racing racing towards the elusive future. They never took a moment to look down at their feet, realising they’re going nowhere. No, they’d rather keep running. They need it. Because to stop would mean they don’t get that prize that waits for them at the end of the rainbow. Their mantra, “I will be happy when…”

Those who don’t live in the present time, are in limbo. They aren’t living. We’re already halfway to dead.

The person in the past is tired. The person in the future is tired. And time laughs on. A great booming laugh because it has captured yet another generation of people. Mocked us from birth to death. Because we never do learn.

I hope that time turns around and looks upon your face today, as you look upon his, and says, “oh, you’re actually here. How about that?”

Sincerely,

S. xx