Fuck, am I old? Part of me agrees, and it is true. I don’t like to write about personal things, the ones I do only have access to my eyes, but certain things bother you more than others which seem trivial. Getting and accepting that you’re old is arduous, something I have failed and refused to acknowledge since I turned like uh 20. So mentally I refused to come to terms with any age greater than 20, I know it’s crazy but it’s an inner inhibitory safety mechanism that I adopted or adapted? to kind of outmanoeuvre the reality of time. Well, I guess even being delusional in that way has a limit now, as it’s waning these days. 25 is probably will or already has broken the shackles of refusal to accept the truth, as I have been dreading this for a while now, now that it’s hardly a month to go it’s looming threat encompasses most of the things that I think about or do everyday, as if it seems to have a major say in my actions, this feels like a big deal and rightly so. Oh damn, where have I lost those years when the least I was worried about was time itself? Not anymore, or maybe if I finally come to terms with it it wouldn’t be so much of a threat but I don’t feel so, it’s entropy anyway and I think I was either designed or destined to feel worse about time with each passing year, albeit it’s an uneasily fearsome entity. This is no existential crisis, at least I hope not, but more of a temporal one.

I mean, technically adulthood has been something on the active for six years now, but I never really got to feeling any older since I was 20 until now, I think it’s the humongous amount of the unknown that is looking over my shoulders, this time different and more real than ever. Tragically, it’s not just you who ages but those around you as well, and this only seems to magnify the conundrum. There feels a formidable bearing upon me, choices seem harder to make, and even harder to act upon. Are the good times behind me?

Amidst this, the reality of most people who could potentially travel back to before times would do so to either fix a wrong decision, an embarrassing moment, prevent a choice from gaining fruition, purge themselves entirely from situations, change their given names, and the like but hardly would anyone want to relive everything over again, it’s blasé and even a chance to relive their time would make them squirm, I don’t blame them. I on the other hand though, if’d the opportunity, wouldn’t care for that and would jump in joy at the first chance to relive, as it’s only the dichotomy that makes it so rich, and has also created my present.

Saudade

I was relishing in memories of every summer recently, and just replaying memories in my mind’s eye seems to have become more than a day dreaming session and more of a ruminating, internal monologue these days, I realised it’s funny that every preceding summer is happier and beautiful than the last. Now it is maddening that I will never be able to go back or relive those years or days or moments again, and the only thing I could possibly do that came close would be to just meander in their memories, there’s comfort in that (Also I realise I’ve become a sappy fuck). Some of us have been lucky, and some not so much. Regardless, we realise that we oughtn’t to become victims of our past selves, and though it could exude into our present, only we wield the volition anchor of choice, and aren’t obliged to it or let it hold us back and can choose to be free.

And you know the time has come or should I say passed, when even your mother remarks you don’t look cute and babyfaced anymore. Well, shit. It’s only the others that can truthfully notice your subtle changes in appearances. Personally I think the reason for that change might have happened in under the last two years and we all know what that is, it wasn’t a sudden change but I guess, in a shorter time frame than you might usually expect in a normal world, and eventually it would’ve happened anyway so fuck it.

“No one who is young is ever going to be old”, said one of my favourite writers, and I can now see its burgeoning importance to my own decaying nature of time. When I think about it, I never really have to change anything about the way I do things already, nothing has to necessitate any change at all, I don’t have to burden myself with ever passing time, it’s only physical atrophy which we can only hinder to an extent with our habits, after all when I look at it from a singularity they seem all one, frozen as a constant, all those years and the coming ones. I shall have to adopt a healthy attitude towards time and embrace age, and thence live with no revulsion of it. The closest we can come to reliving the past is in dreams.

As much as I see the 90s as being so highly regarded and missed, for me personally it was the 2000s, that I miss the most, well it was the majority of my childhood so there’s that, but I think it is an underrated decade and much often overlooked among the various ‘decade’ wars or nostalgic years people love to fawn over.

Now that I ponder about it, it seems as though the years have shrunken in their vastness and eventfulness. Any time before 2020 or 2019 might have had every year filled with a considerable amount of events and moments and days to look back on. I felt every year for all it’s time expanse whether it felt long enough or not. There were definitely more events or maybe they’re just days that felt like events. A year felt like a year I guess, nowadays it feels like a month or a half year for every year, honestly it is the rate of change of time of the observer is the one that has ramped up. But why do I reminisce over those times so much? Sure our perception of time has changed over the years, but the aspect here I think here is that when you have and experience every day identically as everyday has become the same, we process it differently. There is nothing to remember for nothing took place. It feels like a giant void we were dropped without our asking into that we miss nothing of and it makes sense. The only thing we have left are memories. I am sure many could share the sentiment that if not for the pandemic the last couple years would’ve been or given us more non trivial memorable times. But I guess it’s not all terrible, the last couple years have given some people the time to think about their past, to self reflect and evaluate themselves and some have reimagined their lives and turned things around. Some have been thrown into the abyss as well. Some like myself have been thrown in and survived long enough to manage to get out of the abyss. To the children and teenagers, and especially the ones who cannot attend school, goddamn it that this had to happen, its unfair, to lose some of your best years to sitting in front of screens, living through such times in mediocrity is quite heartbreaking, but maybe it’s a different kind of time we live in now, whence I cannot fathom having the frolic I’m familiar with.

It’s not like there weren’t adversities, they were indeed there as is always the case, in history, but maybe they were more fragmented and spaced out, in contrast to a global singular adversity ending up a collective disaster. But it wasn’t that we failed to endure through them all, the world and us did fight to survive through challenging times only to end up here. We felt we could take on anything, we had a great stupid faith and courage and resolve, and to come crawling through drenched in weariness, faint numbness, grief and empathy. From a world’s perspective though, a lot has indeed fucking happened since 2020 began, people have died, systems broken, some things beyond repair. The socioeconomic class divide became larger than ever, an NP time problem probably, the old adage, rich got richer and the poor poorer. Powerful people went about acquiring more of it if they even could, monetising tragedy and capitalising on failed systems and loopholes and even scientific research to get their way. The only silver lining despite all these shortcomings, I could see? Science has won, as it always does. I couldn’t imagine a timeline where we did not have a functioning vaccine in a year, the chaos and derision that would have ensued. Eventually we would have had them but would’ve had much more of humanity’s sanity and lives to lose. Well, there was and still is enough pseudoscience to last us a lifetime of pandemics, but there is only so much we can do to reason with people of those kind, the rest only natural selection can take care of. I believe the failed governments and it’s people in the long run will lead themselves to their graves. Some people don’t or maybe cannot realise the privilege they have, they could just be normal folks you might see everyday, yet they do not see reality, I don’t know if to call it delusional, with ubiquitous internet and increasingly the ones who belong to higher ages, yet life’s experience hasn’t made their naïveté any lesser, and proselytise anything contrarian to reality or the government prefers them to, they love to live in their groupthink bubbles. It amounts to a life wasted when one cannot think critically of oneself or of one’s world, and to not make amends that could enable growth of one’s wellbeing, mental fortitude and integrity, in a similar vein to I myself am going through now for instance, ah bloody hell. More so than before, with the changing times, we realise that we are truly alone and helpless here and whatever we might think or do with ourselves or with our world has time and again, it’s repercussions and only we’re aware of that and can strive to do right by. As humans, our ability to learn from failure is our only guiding beacon of light to evolution, we don’t necessarily have go through all of them, since we can potentially gather the knowledge from others. I remain cautiously optimistic towards coming times, it might just take a little while.

Of course, not that everything was perfect or anything, that’s not taking away the darkness of the yesteryears, I look back on those years not forgetting the imperfections they had, all bad was made up for it with enough good to last with a quiet peace within the melancholic limitations of lives. But I don’t look to the future cynically, but rather to strive for the same kind of peace and contentment that might’ve been had. The difference is our lives have changed without our realisation over this time, when we used to live in the present has now been altered, I don’t know if the pandemic had any role in that but it might have, now we look to a brighter future, struggling to live in the present and are unable to do so, caught between the past and the future. At least I don’t think too much about the future, as my mind tends to drift to the past, but I can see how several people who cannot do that tend to look past forward into the future. I want to get to a point where I like how things look now, to savour and enjoy this time, just like I used to. All I have is gratitude for the past and present, and hope to the future.

P.S. I recently caught up with an old schoolmate online (first time since we left school), and some of his impromptu thoughts then, I now realise subconsciously might’ve espoused some of this, I’m thankful as it’s cathartic and helps me cope.