Sunday 2 January 2011

Time and unreality


Time slips away quicker and quicker each year, with an unknown urgency. Maybe it's as the verse says, that creation waits and groans for the coming of the Creator, for the setting of all things right, and it's getting nearer.
Sometimes I feel as if I'm standing just outside the slipstream. Everything is rushing onwards, people are getting caught in the flow, in the great events that are forming, clustering, speeding explosively by; and just outside, separated by a thin wall of unreality is where I stand, watching.
I know it's probably not like that, but it just feels that way. It's as if everyone is getting caught up in the great picture and I'm still muddling by, still afraid to step out of the boat, still afraid to take the plunge, still afraid to say I'll go where ever you take me. Yet at the same time, I know it's not time, I'm not ready. The place is still here, the time is still not yet. There are depths to be plunged still, if I could steel myself to it. There is more to be done HERE. So it still comes back to the crux of the matter, as it has ever been for me.

The here and now or the there and then.

If you didn't already know, I have problems living in the present. It always feel as if everything I am doing is leading up to something next, something coming. And when I reach it, I don't know how to respond. It's as if I'm walking through a haze of things that are happening around me, things that I have been waiting for, and yet am not fully a part of. It's as if in the midst of the GREAT AND ANTICIPATED EVENT I've somehow stepped out of my body and am watching everything going on, as if it's a movie. So it's happening and yet not happening, if you get what I mean.
Maybe this is why I enter major post-event depression all the time, no matter how small or large the event is. There's some random tinted glasses in my that mind blocks me from seeing the things that are happening in the midst of all the things that I had hoped would happen. There's an inability to sense the reality of the present; the mind wanders to what I am not experiencing rather than living in the moment of experiencing it. Does that even make sense?

And nothing is ever as it seems, is it?

Time is a funny thing. I feel as if I'm always living forward and looking backward, but am never where I'm supposed to be. Everything seems to be a tomorrow or a yesterday. Today doesn't exist for itself, never exists for what it's meant to be: the now, the present, the here. Today is here for tomorrow, for the things to come, for the yet-to-be. Tomorrow is here for the yesterdays, for the things that have been, to make right the things that have gone.
In the short story A Thousand Deaths by Orson Scott Card, the Russian prosecutor, after having tried to elicit a convincing confession from dissenter Jerry Crove by killing and reviving him many times (you'll have to read it to understand it), asks him, "What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can't you make up a lie and believe it?"
Crove answers, "It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief."

Take from that what you will.