Leaves started to turn slowly at first. A spattering of trees here and there might turn a bright orange. Or red. Or yellow. In parts, maybe, the color would almost appear to be fighting against the green, snuffing it out rather than the other way around. Soon, though, soon the colors would explode. Seemingly overnight, the hint of color shifted into a cascade of color against those trees and plants which never give up their green hue.
Maybe it is always a slow march — a progression of one leaf to the next, maybe in small groups here and there, gradually taking over until completion. Distraction steals this visual away, however, as we neglect to observe the change from day to day. Instead, life happens. Family, meals, friends, work, that damned smartphone… it all pulls at our attention, keeping us wrapped within a sphere where the rest of the world appears opaque around us. We live our lives oblivious to the time passing by us.
My friend once told a group of us, one being a new father, how “the days drag on; the years fly by.” Up to then, I had no good phrasing to describe the passage of time as an adult. Strange how time always seems to drag on, only to be long gone before we realize it. A blink within the long parade of malaise.
Time is such a funny phenomenon. Real and imaginary; measurable and immeasurable. Yes, scientifically, it is a real, measurable thing, yet we seem to exist both connected and disconnected from it. Able to move through it back and forth with ease, albeit via memory and imagination.
Years slip by in the drumbeat of constantly ticking seconds. Days much in the same manner. Days give way to weeks and months, each bringing us closer to death. The finality of that ultimate ending for each life seems an eternity away, all while beckoning at each of us like a predator stalking around the corner. Encounters with it only briefly bring the finality of it all into stark reprieve…
I catch myself every so often realizing how time moves, how little time I have left. Imagining I live long enough (at least until the average age of an American male in my country during the age in which I live), it feels like it is but an eternity away. It is not.
It could well be tomorrow.
People immediately think of the tasks they might leave incomplete. Though, if we are ever honest with ourselves, those thoughts extinguish rapidly. Given long enough — moments, really — and we all will revert back to habit. Only those making concerted efforts to nudge their behaviors toward a different path each day might find this to be otherwise.
Eventually, though, the callings of the day will take back over. Work will resume. Notifications will call for our attention, wrapping us back into the snare of our digital devices. Time once again will slip through our grasp.
Thinking about it, I am not all that certain it was ever any better throughout history. Were any of our ancestors capable as a whole to eschew distraction, to ignore the calling to ignore time’s passage? Were we ever able to watch the changing of the leaves day to day to day? Likely, ever since we started to contemplate the very meaning of time, we found ways to allow our mind to escape from it. Reading up on philosophy through the ages absolutely confirms this assertion.
No matter what happens, it seems time will march forward. People might try avoiding the guarantee of death, the inevitability of their expiration, but it will come, regardless of the efforts we put in its path.
In a sense, thinking on the inevitability of death helps to keep things in perspective. Remembering one’s own mortality can help to bring focus into daily life. It can also be an overwhelming idea, too. Wasting time, after all, is also a part of life.
Letting a mind wander off is often a crucial part of the creative process. Cells send ions back and forth in ways we know little of as our consciousness flickers out of the now. Some call it daydreaming. And at least to this creative, it is a necessary part of the process. Nothing gets done in the literal sense. Paint remains in the tube. The canvas stays empty. And time passes without notice.
Would I dare ask to pay full attention to the world at all times? What would it mean for memory then, if one cannot pause to reflect on the past? Daydreaming is not all that dissimilar from simple reminiscing. One can indeed daydream of a memory — the very definition of reminiscing, if you ask me. Smartphones — the bane of modern society interferes with this process, I think. Where boredom led me to daydream in the early days of my own life, or to take up tasks to stave off the boredom. Why be bored now when entertainment is a meme away?
Brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows decorate most of the trees around where I live. It is a process that only began mere weeks before. I noticed it, even as I had to travel away several times since. Blink, and time is gone. A memory of a moment briefly captured each time I revisited home. I’ve been trying with acute desperation to avoid the normal distractions packaged with the experience of modern life. Temptation covers these devices and the ideas of the world happening on social media — windows into the many lies each of us tell in order to make us believe things are more exciting (less mundane) than they really are. Here I am clamoring to see some photoshopped image when I can witness the beauty of the sun rising?
Where my thoughts landed in recent weeks is how much of the media now consumed (everything from social media to news to music) is fake. Contrived. Dishonest. Empty. It can be entertaining, sure. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, yes: it captures and holds our attention. Still, I feel largely empty with the vague distaste of having caught someone in a lie after consuming any of this entertainment. The question moved from why I am not using my time to do other things, such as write, but to now asking why I am wasting my time with that stuff at all?
Time is finite. I mean by saying this, that we only have a certain amount of it on this planet, in our current form. Death might bring any number of nexts, but our time as we know it has a defined beginning and end. There are only so many years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds we get to live here on Earth. Scrolling endlessly on social media doesn’t sound as appealing the longer I sit with the idea. The more it turns to be itself a lie, the greater my distaste is becoming. Do I wish to keep up a lie?
Maybe a lot of this idea is growing from the greater length of time I spend away from the page. Writing, my primary creative pursuit, has been challenged greatly this last decade. Little has come forth, with only brief periods of productivity.
Procrastination and the feeling one has all the time in the world helps there, allowing me to convince myself willingly to put things off for another day. Motivation will be there later. Inspiration will strike. The Muse will grace me with her presence. Time continues on whether or not these happen. Eventually, like the leaves of a tree changing color without someone noticing all the days where they shifted little by little, the pages are left blank.
A book goes unwritten.
Years pass without any change to my writing.
In a way, creativity is more like a tree in spring, leaves budding one by one to eventually cover the tree. Without the work, the tree remains barren. It’s a race against the changing season of life. Missed opportunity means branches go bare. An inverse of the falling of the leaves in a manner of speaking, but I digress.
Gradually, we suddenly will come to the end of our days. Somehow, if I continue to move through my life in the same way, the way media and the world is trying to push everyone, I will more likely be caught off guard by this inevitability. Unable to answer the question in the affirmative, “did I spend my time well?” No. Most certainly, I did not spend my time well here. What’s worse, I may not be able to answer what I did spend my time on.
The days drag on; life flashes by.
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