“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
Time is a strange thing.
Some days you feel like you’ve got forever and, yet, at other times, it slows down to a point where the end of the day can’t come quick enough.
Truth is, time is no more than an experience. What counts is how we lean into and live out our lives.
…And for most of us (so it seems to me), we’re riven with guilt if we’re not doing. Yes, that’s it. We are a ‘doing’ society. Not one driven by contemplation, let alone any amount of introspection.
You see it everywhere you go.
It’s so exhausting.
But then again, imagine if your focus wasn’t so disparate and you only had one or two things to focus on.
I know I’m speaking out of turn in a lot of what I say — what do I really know? — but one thing that now clear to me is that I’ve wasted so much of my life doing the wrong things. Perhaps that’s just life, but I’m positive that if only I’d sat down and thought about: (a) what I really wanted to do with my life; and (b) where I should invest my energies that I wouldn’t have emerged from the chrylissis of adulthood into a world of expectation mostly founded on the need to be something or someone. I can’t know for sure but I’d like to think that if I was patient enough for the answer to emerge (“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…” — Rilke) and a bit of doing to test my thesis that I’d have followed a very different path.
I’d have created art; it would have been the only way to sustain my soul. That wouldn’t just have lead me down a very different path but it would have trimmed my needs and wants to the point where everything, every experience and every relationship took on new meaning.
Photo by Fabian Bächli on Unsplash