The Travesty of Time
and the (slightly) winnable war
Claude Monet lived for eighty-six years. In his eighty-six years, he created more than a thousand art pieces. Jane Austen lived for forty-one years. In her forty-one years, she was able to get six of her novels published and loved worldwide. Both figures, one with double the time on their hands than the other, are well known in their own fields for pioneering excellence.
At first glance, the numbers make you stop and think - maybe more time means we can do more. Dear reader, if I told you today, that you had a hundred years to live, what would you do? Worse, if I told you that you had just ten more hours to live, what would you do then?
From the moment we are born, we are constantly running out of things. We are running out of love outside ourselves, within ourselves. We run out of patience, joy, sadness even. Most of all, from the second we breathe in for the first time, we are running out of time.
There is so much I can do, I just don’t have the time - this is a reason we often find most abundant in our minds. Why aren’t you learning to draw when you really want to? You miss a friend, why don’t you talk to them? Why didn’t I update my newsletter since the last (two?) months? There is no time.
The constant passage of time is a truth as constant as our need for oxygen and our inevitable deaths. Years of evolution took away our tails, our body hair, made us homo sapiens from apes, and yet, Darwin couldn’t figure out why, exactly why, we were never going to win against time.
Of course, with the advent of capitalism, came the human’s ability to sell anything to another, even water. Science held capitalism’s overbearing hand and decided to sell us time management tools and techniques, ranging from free-to-premium apps and self help books.
You and I both know they didn’t help. I wrote this newsletter a little too late, and you didn’t do that thing you yearned to do because your mind fed you the most common excuse it could find - we don’t have the time.
A thought hits me then - is it the lack of time that scares me, or the courage it takes to spend time, knowing that I just might end up wasting it?
The phrase, “wasting time” is the root of it all, my brain supplies to me. We waste our emotions away on regret, on fear, but unfortunately, trying out something we desperately want to is something we will never do, lest we waste time.
Let’s see what happens if you “waste time”. You decide, on a whim, to experiment in story writing. You write a few ideas out, you decide to look for feedback. You put your newborn work out into the harsh world, on the harshest outlets for true art - social media. Algorithms seek to show other accounts “popular content”. Your content doesn’t make the cut. Some people read your work, they love it too, but it’s not enough, is it? It never really is. In we go, straight into the vortex of validation. Finally, when we step out of this vortex, the life sucked out of us, we conclude that, we’re not good enough, and we have “wasted time.”.
First of all, my dear, dear friend, stop associating yourself with the concept of “wasting time”, because there is no such thing. You can’t waste time, it is already passing. It wastes away every minute. If you spend a year in a relationship with someone who couldn’t love you as much as you thought they could, you didn’t waste time, and neither did the other person. You spent it; time is meant to be spent.
So get out. Write, dance, pray, sing, learn, experiment. Spend time. Don’t let time spend you out. Spend it out first. Tell someone you love them, let your love rot when they say they don’t feel the same way. Do you know why time is the most inevitable truth of them all? Because, dear reader, I promise you, you will never run out of it. You and I, we will die. Our bones will rot, and so will our rotting legacies. But as long as our hearts beat and our bodies breathe, you and I will never run out of time.
Start today, start tomorrow, start years later. Spend every ounce of time given to you with every breath, and spend it however you want. Sit still, race around, love, paint, sing, dance, live. For you and I, we have defeated the travesty of time.
You and I? Dear reader, we have all the time in the world.
Till next time, (and hopefully very soon),
Apollo.
this actually made me tear up. it's exactly what i needed to hear today.
"let your love rot when they say they don't feel the same way" sighe sim you're just so aksdjalskhlkfhsdksg you're so so cool