What is it about time? There is never enough of it, and at times it feels like there is too much. I have been thinking a lot about the rhythm of life and the role that time plays in it. The way that it whisks by you in the moments of levity, and the way it tends to sit in your bones when life feels stagnant.
Over the past nine months, time has stood still. Not like in one of those movie moments where everything slows and the leading character finally arrives at clarity. Instead, it has felt like a thick marine layer of fog has set in and obfuscated the view. There is no looking back, and it feels impossibly hard to look forward in a time of such uncertainty.
It is a strange thing to feel robbed of time but also burdened by the over presence of it. Maybe it is because so much of our identity is wrapped up in how we spend our days that we lose ourselves without the motion of life. With no milestones to punctuate our time, the days feel superfluous and without any sense of meaning or purpose.
In the period before the way we know the world to be now, the common refrain was that there are not enough hours in the day. Now many of us have more time than we know what to do with, but it seems wasted in this moment. Like in so many areas of life, it isn’t excess that makes us richer. Time is valuable because it is scarce, and it is in those transitory moments where we feel most alive.
Time makes fools of us all. We like to believe that we have control over it, but it is time that has mastered us. Though it feels painstakingly slow at this moment, it is passing us by all the same. And so it is the bent hand of time ever arching into that which we believe is true and that which we know to be fleeting.