All the Ordinary Things

Because I'm currently faced with a surplus of it, I've been thinking about time. Spinning on my desk chair, I was thinking about how all the days have begun to melt into one another, and how much brain power I've historically dedicated to distinguishing a Monday from a Tuesday. When I have a surplus of time, I also have a surplus of thoughts. Eating takeout Paneer Makhani, I've been thinking about life and how precarious and fragile it is. I've been thinking about what it means to live and what exactly makes life rich; how life ends with absolutely no regard toward this richness; how life, itself, the concept, is not conscious; about how, in the words of Sam Harris, "consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion." Of course, all of these different thinks eventually came together as one big, overwhelming think. I started to think about life and its relativity to time. Time and its relativity to life. Where consciousness fits in all of that.

And then my brain hurt, so I went downstairs and made a cup of tea.  

Currently, I'm reading the novel Henry, Himself by Stewart O'Nan. It's about an elderly chap named, aptly, Henry. It follows his everyday life. It's very simple, and very quiet, and flourishes beautifully in that simple quietness. As he gets older, the book's synopsis tells us, "[Henry] weighs his dreams against his regrets and is left with questions he can't answer: Is he a good man? Has he done right by the people he loves? And with time running out, what, realistically, can he hope for?"

Good grief. There it was again. Life relative to time, time relative to life. I read books, in part, to escape my own head and dive into someone else's. And yet, here were my thoughts, being thought by a character someone else thought up and deposited in a book. My Big Think just wouldn't leave me alone. So I sat down and started to write.

Here's what we'll address first: the idea of time running out. I think it's funny, all the boxes we put time in. Wasted Time, Well-Spent Time, Happy Times, Sad Times. Time, itself, is none of these things. It's arbitrary and perceived. It's the way life mingles with time that results in all these titles and associated emotions. I don't think time can run out. Time carries on, no matter who is living or has died. Time stops for no one. To say time is running out is to say that a certain amount of time has been allotted to you, and as you live, is gradually pressed out like fresh orange juice until you're left with nothing. Except for a glass of orange juice. Hopefully the kind with bits in it. What was I talking about?

Right. Time owes you nothing, in the same way life owes you nothing. But here's a difference between life and time; life is easily gone, and time is everlasting. You are not granted a certain number of minutes when you enter the world, as you are not necessarily assured a certain quantity of life. The way you live your life affects the time you'll have to live. The time you spend on elements of life affects the quality, the richness, of that life. Where life begins, time is. Where life ends, time continues.

And here's something nice: we are, never, without time. For the entirety of our lives, we have time. It's always there, a constant measured by 60s and 24s. And, when we die, we've not been deprived of time, either. After all, the time post death never belonged to us in the first place. Time becomes yours as you live it, not as you plan it out to be. This makes me think that life is a series of accidentals, resulting in things you couldn't have dreamed up in your wildest of dreams. 

What if we lived life the way time naturally operates? Minute by minute, second by second, interval by interval. Nothing promised, but nothing taken away, either. Overall, I feel rather neutral when it comes to time. I don't love it, but I don't hate it, either. It is only in relation to the past or the future that I begin to have an emotional attachment to time. When I begin to regret or to hope, but never in the moment. In the moment, it is just time, and I add the seconds to my basket as I go.  They're just there. 

If seconds are nothing to us as they pass, but become something as they ripen, then all the ordinary things in life must, too. Life is just a series of moments and routines and not-so-extraordinary happenings all piled together. Life is the doctors visits and the banal shopping ventures, the movie nights and the cool spring mornings. It's a quilt of all things ordinary; pancakes and toothpaste and jazz and thermostats and tax returns. 

Life is a mosaic of time. Consciousness - what it is to be, what it is to perceive - is what gives the mosaic its color. 

Life belongs to the individual, but time doesn't belong to anyone. Consciousness is what it is like to be, in time during life. It is composed of the forever and the fragile, the balance of life's unpredictable nature and time's seemingly endless continuum. Consciousness hangs right in between. 

So this, I've decided, is what makes life rich. Being something. What it is like to perceive something. What it is to experience and to fall in love and to cry and to stub your toe and to die. Collecting seconds as they come to you. Looking back to reminisce and to learn, and peering ahead despite the fact that the future isn't yours for the taking. 

I wonder what can be classified as nothing. I wonder what everything means to me, and how that differs from the guy behind me in the Starbucks drive-thru. I wonder how things begin in reference to time and end in reference to time, but how time itself isn't really impacted by starts and stops. 

The world is a big, crazy mystery. This blog post is a small girl, incoherently marveling at that big, crazy mystery.

So what's the take away here? I'm not really sure. Take it as you will.

- Maya

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash, Photo by Luisa Azevedo on Unsplash,

Photo by Ivan Moncada on Unsplash, Photo by Igor Kasalovic on Unsplash