have always had an odd relationship. Time has always dodged me, eluded me, surpassed me, failed me, beaten me, driven me, defeated me, ran out on me, have taken eons in passing, laughed at me, in short time has played its hand with me and yes, it has won.
Life always has a story or rather many stories. Sarte' asks; is life what we live and what happens to us, or what we think and remember of it, and recount. Life in this respect is our retelling of it, what we choose to remember of our adventures, or what 'happens' to us. In this way a small insignificant incident may take a huge proportion for the effect it has on us, on our actions and thoughts. Truth has not much to do with it at all. What role does time play here in this storytelling? I wish, just like Sarte' that my life events flow out of me on this page one after the other, in neat sequential and ordered form, just as I imagine a neat daily diary ought to be. But,alas, life isn't like that, or is it? at least, I don't recall it being anything like that at all. My past meshes into my present, and what is present somehow reeks of nostalgia of days long gone by. I smell the smell of my childhood home, of the grass in the garden, I feel the heat of the sun on my bare legs in the scorching summer months of karachi when as kids we would wile away our afternoons in the garden much to irritation of my mother and her failed efforts to put us within the cool four walls. I am here now, yet a part of me isn't with me, I have left it somewhere, would lost be the right word for it? perhaps?
Time has a tendency of tricking me. At certain hours I feel I have found in it my perfect ally and confidante. I and Time at that point share the same pace, the same steady slow shifting shuffling tread, and I am comfortable with myself. And then, as though, suddenly it jumps at me and terrifies me with its horrendous twists and twirls, and it churns and hurls me like the eye of an hurricane. The shennigans of time are hard to fathom.
When in the dark depths of nights I stand facing the enigma of Time, recollections of life gone reveal themselves before my mind's eye and I in vain try extending my hand to hold them, to subsume myself in them, to transport myself through a wormhole into hours long gone and now reduced to nothingness. I feel double crossed by Time. Where have all those moments vanished to? is there a place designated in the realm of reality where events that have been are relegated to? Is there a specific 'warehouse' of memories, of lives lived? how does one find that out? and if there is one how does one get to it?
'What will be' in other words - whats to come, the future - in which we constantly immerse ourselves, which we live in proxy in our imagination and fantasy, that future state of being lures us towards itself with promises of elusive happiness, of reams of thoughts of life as it ought to be, nay, as it must be, for that is our raison d'etre. We must have a reason to exist in this time and space and if that reason hasnt been realized uptill now then it must unveil itself in the coming days.
Time then isn't just passing of one moment into the next and so on, it is a way of grasping what happens in life, it determines the 'when' of things, not just in a continuim of time as we normally understand it, but in our acceptance of events as they happen to us and how they alter us.
Time is around us, and in us. It envelopes us like a mist surrounding us on all sides, and cocooning us from outside. Time is also very much a part of our mind, we think of what was, hence we travel back in time, and we imagine what can be thus push forward into the yet to arrive future. We truly conquer time in this way, dont we?
Then, pray tell me, why am I still apprehensive of Time?
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