Thursday, August 3, 2017

Time Is Like Water

I had a bath today.
Coming up from the water, after washing the shampoo from my hair.
At around the same time a year ago, I was coming out of a thick fog of anaesthetic
after surgery to remove part of my body
so as to save my life.

I had a bath today, and thought about how time is like water.
We are conceived into a seemingly unending ocean of time,
which we are as unaware of as the amniotic waters we temporarily live in.

As children, life stretches endlessly before us, never behind.
Children only look forward, and wish they were older.
Time's ocean is still so vast and mysterious, swirling around us - what will we be, when we grow up?

I think it's in our thirties that we start to notice something changing.
There isn't as much time as there used to be, somehow.
We say things like 'How can it be July already?'
and 'It seems like yesterday that I was still at school!'

We feel vaguely confused about this, but life is so very busy and we don't pay it much heed.

There are occasions when time seems to stop;
 at the birth of a child, or the death of a parent.

 The rhythm of the waves of time change,
and we are left floundering, gasping...
everything seems upside down and far away.

Somehow, we regain a sense of equilibrium,
and carry on.

We don't realise that the ocean of time that we live in
is really a bath with an ill-fitting plug.

Time disappears while we are busy,
slowly draining away, season by season.

Sooner or later it runs out and we are left, high and dry.

Or are we?

I live within the boundaries of time, but my life is more than the time it takes to live it.





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