@daniellucas is someone I’d been reading here on 200wad, and his writings often prompt me to sit up and think. Maybe it’s because I enjoy reading musings and reflections on life…maybe it’s his writing style. It’s beautifully descriptive in the way that I’d been enjoying writing. So his recent one about “Subjective time”, left an impression for sure.

It’s funny how time moves as you get older - the velocity feels incredible, as you go from blurry days to blurry weeks to months and years. I’m still in the weeks phase of the propelling, but I sense the impending truncation of all things. How moments explode, collapse and disappear, how conversations that feel ground-shattering lose their sheen, and how quickly.

I love that paragraph. Time exploding, collapsing, disappearing, like stars bursting into blackholes. I wrote back, saying that’s why they say, “The days are long but the decades are short.” So true, especially as one age, this peculiar experience of time becomes more pronounced.

And experiences that shook my world just a few weeks ago, “lose their sheen, and how quickly”. I’m still desperately trying to hold on and savour the final drips of my recent 3-week trip to Kyoto. But how quickly, it loses its sheen. Work piles up and life goes on. And those precious, explosive moments then, now collapse back under its own weight, turning heart-achingly dark and lightless. Nothing comes through no more. No light. No joy. 

In a way, we’re all time travellers in our own subjective space-time continuum. Our own subjective experience of time, how fast or slow it passes, is never quite identical to another, even if they shared the same experience. Same people in a lift going up an office tower, but just ask the person in an urgent need to pee how long the 10 seconds in the lift felt, versus someone else in the lift who didn’t need to go. 

We’re all time travellers.

Travelling on our own path, at our own time and pace, nudged along by the hands of fate. 

The hands of the ripening and the ruining, the hands of circles around the sun and respiration. The hands that remind you nothing good can stay, and neither will anything bad. 

Often grudgingly. Sometimes unknowingly. Definitely, onward.