time

Progress

There was really no other choice than to move forward. That was what movement was: no matter in what direction we started or finished, no matter how we coined phrases or felt regret, or despised the loss, or loved the gain; life was a march towards-or so it seemed.

Towards what?! To what end did we move? Even when we sat still, admiring the stars or enjoying a late autumn day; there still seemed to be a goal. we spent time considering consequences, always in the future; always something or somewhere else.

Always living in motion led to never looking at the past for answers, even as it faded into time immortal, forgotten or feigned. And so, we forgot what it was to live and existed rationally instead. We spent our time with probabilities and possible future outcomes instead of moving towards our dreams and desires, right and wrong, good and bad. And days passed.

We rarely considered the movement itself. We rarely considered the moment, or what it was we were moving towards, or even if we wanted it.

Some Aphorisms

To be a master you must feel like a novice.

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Don’t dumb down the divine

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Ignorance is a challenge; stupidity a choice

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Happiness is not constant pleasure; nor is it unending progress

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Fear is a hammer. It can be a useful tool or a violent weapon

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There is no purpose, only process. There is no point but only progress

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Time knows that it is all there is

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Know what is necessary and take the rest in stride

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It is not that we let loose. It is that we don’t tighten up again

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Laziness is not a virtue. Popularity is not a talent

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The drive to be better at the cost of everything else is an empty bargain with the devil

Those Things We Do

“You know what you’ve got.” a friend once said to me. Such a statement is not an epiphany. It is a process that takes time and understanding, understanding what is actually important rather than what we want to be important.

We all have a finite amount of time. What we do with this time is up to us. But in order to realize this takes time. It is a puzzle-play if thought about but if ignored we often find ourselves at a lost and surprised at the end of the days, weeks, and years that we’ve lived.

“Where did time go?” we might ask.

So how do we go about not wasting the precious time that we have? The things that we have should afford us the best use of our time. The things that we think we need should help us understand our time better. And we should experience as much as possible with the time that we have. All the while we think we have time but we don’t know how much time we’ve got.

The answer is fairly simple. We need to rid ourselves of those things, those acts, and those people that waste our time or are not worthy of the precious time that we have. In short,

To “know what [we’ve] got we must get rid of those things that we don’t need.

Some More Time

Time is a funny thing. It keeps moving. Often without us noticing it. Some time is slow and some time speeds past us. every once in a while we feel the breeze of time as it whisks by us and we turn to look; in the past. We are surprised but we shouldn’t be. Time is the only consistent idea.

Time shows itself in so many ways. A wrinkle here, a wall in need of paint, age. But it never changes. Time is the face of god. But even gods must bow to time. It holds for no one and knows no boundaries. There is no world for the amount of time that has passed nor for the amount of time that will be. We can only look up, look back and look forward. We can only watch it pass.

The irony of time is clear: only it is timeless.

And so if we can at all keep any of this in our minds we could look at the world differently, more reverently perhaps. When we believe we have time to spare we might remember that we, unlike time, are not timeless. It might behoove us to remember that time is only a commodity to us. We might change our decisions to reconcile our use of time with the less, much less valuable, the less virtuous, the less worthy. We might even look up at the morning sky and hear nature and silence and thank ourselves for taking those few seconds to do so.

Time is not ours to keep, but only borrow. And for this reason and many more we can realize that time is priceless, that thing that we measure out so carelessly.

Time is an illusion, but it is the only meaningful one that we have.

Time

Time is that thing that we all believe we have. We give time away freely until we cannot. Then, it stands still. Often it’s when small-talk starts; that empty noise that happens so often when there is really nothing to say. It is the fast food version of conversation. Replies are a strain because there is no substance, no subject to the noise. A two-minute meaningless meet-up stretched to a full day of coffee just to stay upright.

This is all true and yes it is painful to watch our time slither away empty handed. But lest we forget; sometimes talk is not about conversation. Sometimes it is about the people that we are with. We may not like them but that doesn’t matter either. One day they will be gone. Time will move on. And then we can bide our time and be alone in our thoughts of those people we once knew. We will realize that we missed an opportunity to make time our own.

It is easy to forget, time. It is our own and no one else’s. It is easy to forget that time is an empty vessel that travels alongside us, always moving and always running to and from us as we stare, empty-eyed into empty eyes and empty minds.

Thank God It’s Friday

It is difficult to portray true sympathy.  The words fail somehow; they become crass or ridiculous.  Language fails often where thought is concerned.  However, it is important, somehow, to express what we feel; especially to those we care about and perhaps more importantly: to ourselves.

Life, it would seem, is very short and it is difficult to be sympathetic to this when the workday seems so long or the weekend so far off.  This, on the other hand, seems to be a failure of thought but the results are the same:

“hump-day…yay!”

“Thank god it’s Friday!”

It is as if we are wishing parts of our lives away.  But we are unable to be sympathetic to the true consequences of doing so.  Those boring days that we wished away are automatically the subject of longing and desire when we realize, in short and few moments, how short life really is.  Sympathy seems important to remember if we are to understand that a beautiful day or a starry night is…well, miraculous.

But our thoughts cannot contain such grandiose ideas and as a result our language fails.  No matter how much we may love, the word “love” will always fall short.  No matter how much we may seem to care, the word “care” never cuts it.

Philosophers have pondered the concept of time and the only objectively real component of temporal ideas: it is the present.  And so, be sympathetic to the present and what it contains, which is the whole universe; something that we may never come to understand.