Time Will Drown Us Out

It’s a natural thing to, as you grow older, feel calmer. This is not to say you’ll feel relaxed about your life, but you’ll be, in a deep way, calmer. There’s a certain complacency that comes with every year — a complacency born of the realization of life’s constancy. Extenuating circumstances aside, most of us will continue living day after day. As children, every day seems infinite and terminal. Tomorrow isn’t spared much thought because we’re so obsessed with now. However, as we keep living, hitting our 20s in decent stride, it almost imperceptibly dawns on us that we’ll continue on as mundanely or sublimely as we can manage.

It’s this unbearable monotony of being that gives us that calmness. It’s a calmness that seeps into our days, our hours, our minutes. Our seconds. Car accidents lose their intensity since we know that, even if we are late for work, even if our car is totaled, the days will march on belligerently. And so forth.

This means that the world around us continues to change, regardless of our interest in it. Imagine, for example, a large white man sitting at a bar. It’s taco Tuesday, but even though there’s no room to sneeze in the crowd, he’s still alone. Weary, clearly, but with a faint optimism just behind his left eye. It’s almost 8pm and he’s wearing a collared shirt tucked into his slacks. No wedding ring. The room is thumping with electric bass and pop vocals. The crowd is in its late 20s, meanwhile he sits at a solid 50 in his barstool. You can tell by his wandering eye that he’s afloat. Time has swept him up in its tide — all he can do is keep his head above water and observe the changing scenery. There’s a complacency to his otherness. His must be a natural progression. It seems that time, like gravity, weighs you down if there’s enough of it.

This is everyone’s lot to some degree. Civilization swallows youth eagerly, and no matter how hard we try, time will drown us out in indifferent favor of our younger models. Of course, this isn’t cause for alarm or melancholy. If anything, it’s perfect reason to live life entirely by our own whim. The days are long but the years are short, so why not enjoy what we have here in front of us?