“Time and tide wait for no man”. This is a proverbial way of saying “you’re not that important and life will move on with or without you”. Ignoring the self-esteem crushing aspect of that message, there is an important point about how time will continue to move forward even if we don’t want it to. Fear of Time reflects tells us life is happening all around you and there’s nothing you can do to pause, rewind or fast-forward. Except for maybe in that classic Sir Adam Sandler film (he’s been knighted, right?), time itself is completely out of our control. Having a Fear of Time means you’ve either accepted this fact or you just realized it now by reading this. By the time you are done reading this sentence, you’re closer to your own inevitable death than you have ever been. C’est la vie.
Editors note: this post gets darkly cynical in a hurry.
Stop & Start Fear of Time
When you were young, you likely thought the sun setting meant the end of one day. You may have also though the sun rising meant the start of a new one. It wasn’t your fault for being naive and not nearly cynical enough. Clearly you just needed to read more Things I Fear content. Now that you’re older, watching a sunset means you need to reflect back on how little you actually accomplished that day. Seeing a sunrise means you didn’t sleep much the night before. This is a cycle you will experience thousands of times over the course of your life.
Having a Fear of Time can be because it’s either going too slow or too fast. In either case, life is not going at the speed you wanted. You might wake up one day, look in the mirror and wonder where it all went wrong or your mirror is still out for delivery and won’t be arriving for a few more days.
Time can be a paradoxical enemy. It either completely stands still or you blink and too much of it has passed. We can often determine how close or far away we are from things using something called a calendar. Many people count down the days until the sudden appearance of Santa as a measure of time until the next family gathering. Some people use their birthdays as a signal another 365 days have passed and they are still working the same meaningless job. Still waking up at the same time every day to head into traffic for an hour. Doomed to be berated by their boss who hasn’t fully grasped the ‘say it, don’t spray it’ concept. Then head back home for another half-full plate of a microwavable dinner that has long passed its expiration date.
Turning Back the Clocks on Fear of Time
The sands of time will continue to fall at their own pace rather than simply let you flip the hourglass over to prolong the inevitable. Despite the fact we can turn our clocks back at least once a year to increase the number of sunshine hours in a day, the fact of the matter is we do not control time. All we can do is enjoy each minute rather than count the grains of sand as they drop. A good way to ensure you’re maximizing your time on earth is to spend it staring at your phone instead of interacting with the world around you.
Life truly is what you make of it. There will always be people who tell you what you are doing is wrong either because it doesn’t conform with societal norms, because it isn’t trending across social media, or because it’s an unpopular opinion. Why should their opinion matter though? Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. You don’t need to make a monumental impact each day of your life. You don’t even need to make any type of impact throughout the course of your entire life. As long as you are living the life you want to live, you are doing just that: living. As the wise Ned Flanders once said before ordering a white wine spritzer, “You only live once”.
Editors note: told you.
