Time...
My current, somewhat unfiltered thoughts on time
I’ve been thinking a lot about time recently
and how it controls our lives, dictates what we do. You know, we’re in an age of short-form content becoming the dominating media format, leading to the nuances of the world (geopolitical events, literature, film, art, etc.) being watered down and completely lost on us. I find it ironic that right now, especially on TikTok (king of short-form content), there is a trend obsessing over the de-aging process, where people my age are already incessantly poring over ways to rid themselves of wrinkles and smile lines, destroy texture and discoloration, and eradicate the purple tinge of an incoming eye bag; and that content has only grown shorter. People are wishing to erase the signs of time passing, while creating content that takes less and less time to make and consume. Literature and films are broken down into lists of tropes and general aesthetics, dialing down their messages and intent, making it more important to have spicy enemies-to-lovers as opposed to a well developed story and romance (and I eat up a spicy enemies-to-lovers). It’s this strange laziness coupled with an extreme need to consume as much as fast as possible. Art is diminished under the watchful eye of time that we continue to give power to in the wrong way.
Time is a gift in so many ways, because when we allow it to pass, we soak up the final lines of a book and think back over every scene and piece of dialogue leading to that moment. We replay scenes from a film in our heads hundreds of times when we’re supposed to be sleeping, and as the days and weeks go by, we change our thoughts time and time again, shifting our mindsets like a light switch. Time burrows its way into so many of our phrases, a dictator and, still, a guiding candle light. It incites complicated feelings. How funny is it that TikTok is called that, as if we’re already being told that we’re running out of time when we click on that app icon? But in fact, we’re not. I mean maybe we are, but is that any excuse to diminish life in all that it has to offer?
There are always deadlines, always something to be done, something to dread, something to look forward to, all of these things barred and opened up by time. Many people say to avoid it, especially now. I want to embrace it. I’ve cared about it so much more since the pandemic, where everything slowed down, to my quarters of college, where everything goes by in a flash. I don’t want a prolonged life nor do I want a shortened life. I just want the time it takes to be me, whatever that is and whatever that may be. This concern with visual immortality taking over my generation, I believe, must be a result of the pandemic stealing time and life away, and we wish to recapture the selves that never got to grow so desperately that we reject the gifts time seeks to offer us. I remember watching a film where a mother told her daughter to stop smiling because she would get smile lines around her mouth. And even then I wondered why the remnants of happiness and joy would ever be considered a bad thing. Are we so eager to be blank slates, so visually unaffected by the chaotic, amazing, horrible, beautiful world around us? Do we wish to have no legacy left behind on our bodies, plain canvases never touched with the brushstrokes of life’s destruction and creation? When did it become so wrong to have lived? So avoidable? Is it because if we look as though we’ve never lived, we appear as though we’ve never been hurt? As though time has not taken its toll?
I hope that time takes its toll on me. I want to have lines and creases and wrinkles and grey. Because I have survived this thing called life, and I have/will hopefully thrive in this thing called life. A life well lived is what we all want. Why can we not show it?