The jaws of life

A tomb to the anxious mind.
Wings to the wandering soul.

For someone at peace with the past, content with the present, eagerly awaiting what is new, time is a friend.
To some, time is a tyrant that holds you where you don’t want to be, and takes away what you don’t want to lose. It is a reminder of everything you won’t be able to do in this life.
Time represents a relationship we have with the unfolding of reality and the absolute finitude of our capacity to inflict our will upon it.
Life to the hypervigilant mind is an unceasing ingress of unwanted information. We look, but we don’t always want to see. So why do we look? Well, the status quo of our emotional home necessitates the looking. The one who sees best can best prepare himself for adversity. The time spent observing and analysing will pay it’s dividend when trouble is afoot. So we look, because our emotional home lives on inside the child encapsulated within. But what if trouble no longer lives around every corner? When do we exchange our tired vigilance for something more adapted to present circumstance, and what the hell does it have to do with any of this? Well, the ‘when’ question is hard to answer, but it always involves willful vulnerability, a good bit of crying, some snot, and love. The ‘what’ question is easier: This is our story. Our story is the passage of our life. It is how our time passes, it defines our relationship with the passage of all. It colours the lense through which we view other stories, and that experience makes the whole notion of time split into multiple dimensions:
The passage of patterns; A story playing out; The beginning of a new story or the ending of an old one; Repetition; Novelty and it’s half-life.
Where is your heart sitting on all this? Where does your mind linger? Perhaps you are here for yourself first. You make decisions based on your very personal wishes for experience. In that mode time holds the moments of discovery and play you ventured through, as your reality expanded and the dynamism of matter and mind interacting stirred the cartesian gears of comprehension. Perhaps you live for others first and whatever you really want is perpetually delayed and as you find yourself having walked further than your young self thought you would, you wonder, “when do I get to live?”

Getting old. Turning grey. Your skin becomes noticeably less firm. Lines on your face are no longer temporary. Vision is no longer 20/20 and squinting has lost it’s effect. Time represents decay. The steady departure of youth and it’s vitality.

What of the times when we are stuck, hearing those words that have hurt us so many times. Words we reject as untrue but which we have come to believe none the less. The times when our mind wrestles with a circumstance viscerally uncomfortable, lasting. We don’t want to be here, we don’t want to see this, feel this, think this. Minutes, hours, days, months, years of a thing from which you can’t seem to extricate yourself. Your consciousness is shackled to this, and the shackles can’t rust fast enough.

Thank God it’s over… But is it God? Is it over? Isn’t the thing that was why now is now? Isn’t the burning sky what makes blue so beautiful? Aren’t our hands clean because we washed them, and we washed them because they became sufficiently dirty? Isn’t the death by germs why we can now prolong life? Why the fuck are we doing all of this if the accumulative, productive potential of the passage of variable instances of imperfect matter and imperfect mind does not represent, on balance, something our questioning mind cannot argue with? Something that feels like love, and those moments that just cannot last long enough. When a plan comes together and intentions align, the synergy of bipeds harmoniously interacting…

Time can certainly make one feel the absence of meaning as much as it can instill the sense of it. It is both the moments that call on our tenacity and the moments that put us to sleep. Time is the beast in the darkness that devours us alive, and it is the value modifier that quickens the spirit, excites one to embrace adventure. It is our anxiety and it is our relief. Time is a duplicitous cunt for which there is no salve. It is insanity, and it is the very thing that keeps us.

When I was 16 years old a man told me I will be old before I’m 30. It called up the screaming voice of the only thing that is true, the thing I met as a child, the interdimensional instantiation of existencial passage. The unforgiving, impartial father of the divide between what is and what isn’t. Chronos stared at me as I cried myself to sleep because I knew there would never be enough of him or me to satisfy the spirit that animates me. In this version, of this world, I am furniture. I am a tree. I am the saddle on an ass, under an ass.
I know these analogies take away agency. But when faced with determinism one really needs to ask, “am I not just the evaporating drop of sweat which a moment ago appeared as a sensation on the face of a man carrying water from the river?” He is alone, his hands are occupied, I am tickling his nose as I roll around the tip to his upper lip. I might be a fleeting sensation personified, and for a moment, the sole companion of a mind doing all that makes sense to do… feed the machine that carries him.

When we die, time let’s us lie. But time keeps us alive to the living. We turn from flesh to dust to a fleeting pattern of impulses between synapses, and in a way, that is all we ever were. The rest just was, beast breathing, beast eating, beast sleeping. Not needing a name, not wanting a purpose.

So, some believe consciousness is the precursor to matter, and that existence is born out of it. If only we knew what the hell consciousness is. We don’t know what the mind is and we hardly know what the brain is. At least we know that time lives in a watch. Time is a counter, time is a judge, is a call to conscience, adventure, love. Time is the jaws of life chewing us like the best God damned meal it has ever had.