Cosmos of Kate

I think a lot about time. The gift that it is, the strength it takes to endure it, the enemy it can turn into, and the one thing we always end up craving more of.

Growing up in a rural town in southern Oregon, on 20 acres of forested land, summers were what I lived for. The warm days spent playing amongst the trees, walking to the creek to go swimming, riding bikes off of makeshift ramps, picking blackberries on our dirt road. Summers were divine, and they seemed to last an eternity. However, as summers came and went, they always got shorter, each one holding a little less time than the one before it. As much as I wanted to hold onto them, they always seemed to slip through my fingers.

When I graduated high school, the summers had become much shorter than they were when I was younger, time itself seeming to have sped up, just as my life seemed to be doing. However, high school graduation brought with it a whole new meaning to time, almost as though I had graduated to the next level of the time continuum. I vividly remember that day, more so than most other days of my life. The sheer joy I felt at having completed the first level of my life, the excitement of looking forward to the next. Dreaming of my future and all the endless possibilities it held. Time itself seemed to stretch on forever. It felt like having the entire world at my fingertips, just waiting for me to choose from its many winding paths. Though I still couldn’t shake the feeling that time itself was accelerating, I felt in that moment like I had plenty of it to accomplish my all of my dreams and desires for my future.

The thing about becoming an adult that doesn’t sink in until its too late, is that every decision you make, every path you choose, not only shapes who you are becoming, but simultaneously removes all other possibilities from the table. There is no way to go back and make different choices. You still have the ability to change course when you choose, but it will always be a little harder, a little less forgiving, as though you’re being dropped in the middle of the boss level of a video game completely unprepared, instead of starting from the beginning and building up your skills to defeat it. The difficult thing about transitioning from teen to adult is learning the hard way that there is no reset button.

Another hard lesson that time teaches all of us, is that even when we think we’re making the right choice in the moment, that path may lead us to a place where we lose track of ourselves, lose sight of the path entirely, leaving us to wander amongst the trees until we finally fumble our way back, either to the beginning of that path to make a different choice, or finding a different path entirely. But once again, the time we have spent during the journey our first decision took us on, is lost forever.

After a few attempts at trying to find the path we are actually looking for, it might sound better to just take a break. Have a nap under one of the trees. Let our bodies and souls take respite from the difficult choices we no longer trust ourselves to make. But when we wake we find that, once again, more sand has slipped through the hourglass while we were resting. It never stops, not even for a second. We now have even less time to find our way through the wood, and panic starts to set in.

We suddenly feel trapped in a maze of our own choices, lost, turning in circles trying to decide in which direction to take a step forward… all the while, time continuing to slip through our fingers. Tick tock. We suddenly just start running, in whatever direction we’re facing when the merry-go-round stops turning. It’s a shot in the dark, a complete chance, but hey… our choices haven’t been getting us where we want to go thus far, so maybe random chance will. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

When we get to this point of the maze, we start playing back all of the turns we’ve taken, all of the paths we’ve chosen, wondering where the others might have led if we had chosen differently. But we didn’t. Time moves forward. Life moves forward. At some point it stops feeling like we have the world at our fingertips, every possibility laid out before us, and starts feeling like a speeding train, hurtling toward an ending we didn’t choose or want, but have no way to change now.

It’s at this point… the point where we feel trapped, unable to stop the train, unable to find a way off the train, that we can either decide to go to the dining car and drown ourselves in substances that will make us forget our choices, or find a window seat, put our headphones on listening to our favorite music, and watch the beautiful scenery pass us by, appreciating the colors, textures, landscapes that our choices and paths have led to.

This is how we humans interact with time. It’s linear, and will always move forward, no matter how fast or slow we perceive it to be occurring. Though there are two thoughts that calm my nerves when I feel lost in the forest or stuck on the train, unable to change my path.

First, that every choice we have ever made, every decision we were ever faced with, had multiple outcomes, all of which concurrently exist, but only one of which we are able to perceive and live in. And second, that time, though we are only able to perceive it as linear, is anything but. In the book Slaughterhouse Five, the Tralfamadorian aliens perceive all of time simultaneously. Everything that has ever happened is always concurrently happening. While to us something may have ended, a loved one may have passed on, to the Tralfamadorians, that thing is always happening, and that loved one is always alive.

These ideas hold space in my mind because they calm me. They calm the frantic feeling I have when I realize that my life is not at all what I thought it would, or wanted it to be. Even though I might not be living my version of a perfect life, maybe a different version of me somewhere in the multiverse is. Even though this version of me is no longer able to see or interact with my deceased loved ones, an earlier version of me still is, right now. These thoughts bring me solace, and still my wild mind.

Everyone says life is about the journey, not the destination. While that saying can be annoying at times, it does hold truth. Life is a journey, whether we are on the path we want, lost in a forest, or held hostage on a speeding train, it’s important to at least appreciate the scenery around us, because it too, is always changing.

Life is hard, and then you die. So it goes.

But life, the journey, can also be beautiful if you simply take the time to look up.