Death is for the dead; life is for the living.

I’ve spent a long time wondering how a person could be so content maintaining a seemingly dead-end job, but after some investigation, the truth I would come to realize would completely change the way I viewed my life.

And it was so simple, too. So simple that looking back now, I don’t know how I could have possibly missed it. I mean, I must have unconsciously committed to ignoring it every time it stared me in the face because it was so obvious, so present, so loud, so real.

Where I saw a dead-end, they saw opportunity.

The thought alone makes me grieve all the years I lost denying myself opportunities just because I was afraid they wouldn’t be worth the time.

Rather than believing the concept that you could let time itself run free, have it look back at you and realize you’re exactly where it wants to be, I forced it close and I’ve been waking up on the wrong side of the bed ever since. I couldn’t imagine a world where letting time run free could benefit me; that instead of running away from me, it would run back towards me, as if I were the environment its wanted all along.

There’s this saying: if you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.

Well, I couldn’t let it go.

I was so stuck on the thought that time is always running, ticking and chipping away at every piece of my life until I no longer own a second to my name; the thought of death paralyzed me so much that I became obsessive over time and nothing was valuable enough to spend precious seconds on. I let myself be a jack of many trades and a master of none and guess what,

Time ran
anyway.

The thought that time could walk never crossed my mind. That it could slow down, and one way I could make that happen was by simply living life by the day.

Not by focusing on the future, what I want it to look like, and forcing the present to be better than what it is, but by loving the present for what it is and allowing time to do the rest.

I’ve had time chained to the wall for as long as I can remember, like a seed forced into a pot of soil and held at gunpoint with a threat that said no water until you grow.

So much potential in a single seed, yet so mismanaged, so wasted, by the likes of a greedy gardener.

Boxed in and suffocated, I imagine time wept for me. It wept because the thing I didn’t realize and the thing only time could tell, was that I was both the seed and the gardener; the crime and the punishment.

As we live, only time knows where we’re headed. And the only way we’ll ever achieve that kind of awareness is by living ourselves to the extent that time allows us.

But instead of choosing to live, I allowed death to inherit my body and fear to manipulate my freedom of choice.

I wanted opportunity to come to me, like I was entitled to it. As if it were a basic human right, and even worse, that I deserved it. How selfish and rude; small and immature. It’s taken 26 years to understand the beauty of growing on purpose, enjoying life by the day, and choosing to start now; to be messy for the sake of living.

Life doesn’t work the way I thought it did and truth be told, I like that it doesn’t; I’ve never grown so much in a single year as I have this past one and the difference was I went out and chased it. I chased time through the meadows and under the roots of the trees, I counted to ten and searched for it in a game of hide and seek and in the mess of it all, we became friends.

I didn’t realize how much I loved making messes. Disorganized chaos in the form of new beginnings. Splashing paint, spreading glue, hoping to create something so beautiful and new but the beauty of it all is that it’ll never be as beautiful as the time I spent in the act of the art. In fact, the art doesn’t do the act justice; the art will always be closer to death than the act will ever be because once the act is finished, once everything’s all said and done, the art is nothing but a memory on a shelf filled with preservatives to extend its expiration date.

It’s the act that slows down time.
It’s the act that can make time last forever.

I can’t unsee it, I can’t unfeel it, so now all that’s left to do is go out there and be it.

Life was never about the future, it was only about the day.
And that’s the opportunity I’ve decided to take.

What about you? What’s your relationship with time?

How are you living? Where are you living?
Are you living in the present, past, or future?

Think about it.

Cheers,
B.