Help! My time has been stolen!
It was all over before it even began
Time is moving too quickly. I’ve been trying to escape its clutches all my life. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking I’d already missed out on so many things. Too many things. I was late to the mark and would never be able to catch up. It was all over before it even began. I felt like I was behind all my peers in the major milestones that marked adolescence. Like I didn’t break the rules enough or equally I didn’t try hard enough. That my experiences weren’t big enough, memorable enough or simply, ‘enough’ to matter at all.
The summer solstice is around the corner. The longest day of the year. I’ve only just adjusted to the luscious drawn-out summer evenings and to think they’re soon to be snatched from me again feels simply unbearable.
It’s a horribly sombre way to live. Chasing a life. Constantly in pursuit of something and never arriving. All the while, not even really knowing what that ‘something’ was. I’ve never really had an idea exactly what I was missing out on. I guess it was always a feeling, a vibe, an energy. Something intangible that I couldn’t touch. And therefore, could never grab a hold of.
Understanding my inability to ever find the right answer, the thing or moment has actually helped. There might never be something to make me feel like time is on my side, rolling along at the right pace for me to keep up. Accepting this has been the only way not to catastrophise and to have hope for the future.
I think on reflection, grasping at time as it slipped through my fingers like sand has happened most often during the more difficult times with my mental health. It exacerbated my depression and anxiety, fuelling feelings of despair. I have no good days left, I would think to myself. I’ve used them all up and didn’t even do anything I feel truly satisfied or accomplished by. The journey ahead of me has been mapped out entirely based on the decisions of my past and present self. A journey towards a future that seems bleak and without promise if you’ve been fixated on all the things you haven’t done and probably never will do.
Summer solstice is, after all, the beginning of summer. We’re actually only at the very start of things and I’m over here ready to cry and unpack my boxes of winter clothes. By focusing too much on the big stuff and the milestones and the passing of time in big chunks, like seasons, it’s very easy to have an existential crisis. I speak from experience. So, as part of my reflections on time and the dangers of fixating on its passing, I’m trying very hard not to think about it. And to stay firmly in the present instead. I’m actively looking for smaller, everyday moments of beauty. Finding things of no seemingly great significance that make me feel like this would be time well spent. Things without any major consequences on how that thing defines my life or who I am as a person.
According to psychotherapist and author Deb Dana, we should all be looking for ‘glimmers’. Refinery 29 delved into Dana’s glimmer research and looked at how searching for “tiny micro-moments of joy that allow us to feel calm and give us a sense of inner peace” can actually help to regulate your nervous system.
While the word glimmer, defined as a faint or wavering light, insinuates that these small bits of joy are hard to find, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them kind of moments, in reality, glimmers are all around us. They’re your favourite song being played in the grocery store and a flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk.
So, in my attempts at quashing the idea that joy-is-drawn-from-big-overarching-defining-life-moments-none-of-which-I’ve-achieved-and-everything-is-pointless… I’ll be hunting down glimmers of my own this week.