Counting Down the Days

July 12: A Brief Musing on the Elasticity of Time

 The elasticity of time is something that you always expect, but it still manages to creep up and surprise you. I am leaving for college in but a month, and as such, autumn will begin early this year. It has been a languorous summer thus far: of cooking and pond paddling and aimless wandering. I have been pretty bored, honestly, but not bored enough to want to do anything other than exactly what I have done. There is nothing to to remember. Even as I look back on such a short span of time, the days blend together like ice cream melting in a cup.

But now, with my destination in within sight, everything has suddenly picked up speed. Anticipation makes time run faster, I suppose. Now, I feel that everything is rushing toward me all at once. That, or everything is not rushing toward me as much as I am rushing toward everything. I am hurtling at top speed toward a time and place that is new and exciting but also frighteningly alien.

This uncontrollable, unpredictable aspect of time makes it frightening. It provokes anxiety and angst of the most existential sort. But let us think of it another way; The passing of time must happen. That is a fact. The alternative would be time never passing at all. Would I prefer that? Would I rather be stuck in high school, mindlessly working into eternity? Would I rather, even, spend forever frozen in a languid summer? No. Not just because high school was horrible, but also because life is defined by the presence of change—which requires time. And because moving through time is the definition of living, to wish for time to disperse is the same as wishing for death.