Tick tock, going. A short time ago I turned 18, and I worked on my birthday—waking up at the very normal time of very early. In fact the day felt unremarkable like any other. Yet Somehow I had managed to exist, think, and breathe for 18 years, 6,750 days, 78,840 hours, 4,730,400 minutes, and 283,824,000 seconds. After coming to this realization I asked myself: “How and why did I live these moments?” These moments of now, now, now, now, now, now, now that made up my life.
You see I came to the realization time is a gift and a curse. You exist in time therefore you are limited to it. If you mess up one second the next one can be a success. Time is never stopped by your actions. Time is a gift: you must work for it and make it work for you, you must use it all up – every second, and you truly invest what time you has wisely. Why? You will never get that time back. Time becomes a curse only when you neglect it, not plotting the eventualities of where time can take you, more so your actions in time’s course.
My dad always told me that no one should care about you, your well being, and your money than yourself. No one made it anywhere by sitting in bed hoping something would happen to them. Time may be a gift, but it is far from magic. Maybe that’s why I didn’t necessarily consider working on my birthday such a bad thing. You see when you being to treat days as if some are better than others, as if the next hour will be better than this one, you fail to truly enjoy time. If somehow tomorrow becomes motivation for today’s work, that isn’t proactive, efficient, or somehow in any sense good logic to enforce. If you wake up every day treating it exactly the same as the last, you begin to work harder for today, utilizing and filling it in beneficial ways. I think that’s why my working on my birthday seemed not so bad at the time. I was working a long-term goal I had.
Too often I feel we as a society looking to the past, comparing what has been to what is now. There are things you can learn from the past; this is through studying and understanding the past. Alternatively dwelling in the past leaves you in a world of what ifs and what you think could have been.
Yet at the same time we seem to live in the age of “YOLO,” or You Only Live Once. No what has spawned off of rap is now a culture among youth that somehow you are incomplete, a loser, or otherwise somehow boring if you don’t apply YOLO to as many things in your life as you can (such as swimming in a lake at 11pm, jumping off of roofs onto trampolines, and doing drugs of drinking). Here’s why YOLO is so easy to turn into a joke. It implies happiness comes from spontaneous and or risky actions. That somehow you feel happy after this. Yet in the end all you have is a moment lived for no other reason than just for living in the moment. I’m not saying doing risky or spontaneous things isn’t fun or something you shouldn’t do, what I am saying is you shouldn’t need an acronym to make you do it. People who learn to find happiness in the moment, finding joy in the air they breath, the way the light hits a field of wheat –illuminating the grains like a sea of earthy yellow, and doing crazy things with friends that you will remember forever. These things are real joy.
Yet the future is the scariest. It seems to come faster when you don’t want it to, and slow when you do. The future is just the present yet to happen. It seems ominous often. The future is uncertain; it seems to a degree flexible. The future comes and happens whether you want it to or not, and often you feel at its mercy. Yet the future should never be scary. From a young age I learned the 7 P’s: Proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. As I said earlier, the future doesn’t really exist to any physical degree until it becomes the present (physics completely ignored here, I don’t want to spend four paragraphs going over the space/time, relativity, and gravity here, I want to focus on a cognizant perception of time.)
The future is entirely what you make it to be. Sitting and waiting for it to happen does nothing to make it fall in a way you may want it to. The future is malleable. No one when they’re born writes their date of death on their tombstone. You have a finite number of breaths on this earth, it may seem that somehow you only get these then fate does its course and you die. Not true. Never true. You control this number. You control the words you use these breaths on. You control how hard you work and how hard you have to keep up with these choices. You can choose to take moments that take your breath away. Why waste them on sitting, complaining, waiting, wishing, and hoping. I would much rather waste them on doing. Even if you try and fail, at least you know what is and don’t get stuck wondering what could have been. Every breath is a gift. Use it. Cherish it. Hold it in your lungs till it hurts; then breathe it out, all of it. Feel its absence. Go without it for some time. Then once you feel you can no longer go without, breath in. You have just been given a gift. Breathing just is… Just as time, well, just is…
That’s it, That’s all. Read and consider.
I’m not trying to say the death is something to be discredited, devalued, or otherwise forgotten, but there must be some perspective here.
What happened in Colorado was horrible, terrible, monstrous, and egregious. twelve individuals as of today were killed for no action on to their own.
Yet yesterday over 100 individuals were killed in Iraq today in a series of coordinated attacks by al-Qeada. I’m not saying America needs to intervine again…
Even more staggering today the death toll in Syria broke 19,000. Nineteen thousand. People simply often caught at a cross-roads of perspective of Assad and the rebels. Unsure which side to join. Unsure if they will be alive tomorrow. I’m not saying one side is right either…
What I am saying is that death is a matter of perspective and magnitude. How quickly can you relate to the individuals who now no longer have existence. I’m not advocating greater gun control legislation. I’m simply saying to now become drawn up in the fragility of life over this one event ignores how much better we have it here in the US than a lot of places in the world. Gun ownership as well as gun violence are at all time lows. Yet in many places the question of whether or not you be alive tomorrow is not something you know when you wake up.
If we, as a society honestly care about life — and its inherit value— to any degree it shouldn’t matter where death happens. Death is death whether it happens in a movie theatre or in the streets of Syria. To only show concern when it happens in somewhere we can point to on a map without looking it up truly show how little we care about the world we live in.
We live in a very complicated and sometimes messed up world. There isn’t as much a point to writing this as there is perspective. Understanding and caring about the world around you makes you feel far less adrift in its currents.
That’s it, that’s all. Read and consider.
