About Time
WOW - it's been nearly a year since my last post, how crazy is that?! The funniest part is that I wrote about how I had just got a new job so wouldn't be able to post anything other than recipes/food posts. Well, that didn't turn out so well because commuting to and from that grad job left me so frazzled and devoid of any kind of energy that cooking anything at all became a serious challenge! So here I am, 11 months (ish) later, re-opening with a post that's pretty different to any of the others.
I've been thinking a lot recently about time (probably because I have too much time on my hands at the moment to think about these things). In the modern world we are so caught up in the whirlwind of life that every day seems to rush by, insignificant and quickly forgotten or mixed up in a blurred memory of events. I also find myself constantly coming back to the idea of growing old, which at 21 may be a bit morbid but as I find myself surrounded by people (read: adults) who are suddenly a lot younger than me and yet still able to drink alcohol legally, I can't help but think about the future and where my life is headed now that I can no longer blame my failures on being a teenager or a student. This may be in part due to my impending teacher training course looming on the horizon; doubts about whether I will ever be respected because I have a "baby face". It might also be because I have moved back in with my parents and I have essentially - and willingly - regressed to my late teenage years...other than the fact that I now have a car that I paid for with my own money, and 3-4 years worth of adult issues/experiences accumulated since I left home.
Isn't time a funny thing? As I type I can hear the persistent tick of my watch across the room, cutting through the quiet of night time and counting the seconds I should really be asleep instead of writing. And yet I am also acutely aware that time is something which humans have made up - but I'm not nearly enough of a scientist to go any further with that one. People are always telling us to "Take the time to...", insert "meditate in the mornings", "eat a healthy breakfast", "call your loved ones" here. Taking time. To take something. How do you take time? At this point many of you will decide I've officially lost it and stop reading. My literary friends may also worry that taking that final year module in Thomas Hardy could have ruined me for life. But stay with me.
There is a hell of a lot of pressure on our generation (read: my generation) to fill our time with social media-worthy pursuits, taking pictures almost every day to somehow prove that we're filling our time wisely, whether that's with exercising, boozing, eating...the list is endless. Doing sweet nothing has become impossible. Having a PJ day? "Watching Harry Potter 😆 #duvetday #intheonesie" - if you don't tweet/snapchat/instagram a picture of your jammies in front of baby Emma Watson or sassy Goblet of Fire Harry then no one will KNOW that you're having a day of movie-watching bliss. Maybe what we really need is time away from our phones/tablets/laptops.
Because we're constantly filling our time this way, even when we're not 'busy', I often feel like the days are slipping through my fingers. On the other hand, I am always waiting. Waiting for something groundbreaking to happen that changes my life (being offered a book contract, winning the Euromillions, you know the deal). Waiting to be able to travel the world. Waiting for that guy to choose me. And when I look at it that way, I want time to move faster. I could happily wish the months away for all the good stuff to happen to me quicker. But what I, and maybe you also, often forget is that with the good stuff comes the bad stuff. Getting older is bloody hard. It's stressful. There's car insurance, bills, TAXES, and the ever-present worry that Donald Trump will become President and I will never buy my own house (two un-related but equally troubling things).
So here's my solution. I'm just going to accept that time is passing at its own pace, and even though humans may have invented time, we also can't make it go any faster or slower. As I always have - since I watched the movie About Time, thanks Richard Curtis - I will make the most of every day, but not just so that I can get a good Instagram post out of it: so that I can look back at the slight existential crisis I had at 21 and laugh at how brilliant everything was back then, before I had 2 screaming kids, a crippling mortgage and wrinkles.
