2.3

Decomposing time

There is another more stark knowing of time. Some of us can sense the presence of time that isn’t colored by our hopes or despair, that has no known intentions towards us. This sense of time cannot be called good or bad because it doesn’t seem to value either direction. Gains and losses, living and dying altogether seem to register no meaning or concern to time. Such things are merely the effects of its irrevocable force. When time is stripped of our projections and is all naked to us, we see it is impersonal and faceless, incapable of being deciphered by our personal life. This time that invades our every moment is impervious to us, completely unmoved by all its moving in and around us. When we realize this time that compels our living is deaf and blind to even our most impassioned pleas to reconsider how it is driving us, we are confronted with a petrifying truth: we are at the mercy of a merciless time

Beyond our judgments, time shows itself impersonal and impenetrable, violating every moment of our most personal and vulnerable life. It gives and takes in dehumanizing ways, insensible to our purpose and presence. Its nature possesses a kind of twisted logic that it is most able to move us because it is so immovable. The more clearly we see its impersonal nature, the stronger becomes its pull on our attention, like a trauma sucking everything into itself and leaving behind only the absence of what once was, an emptiness in mourning. In its naked presence, our daily activities become painfully gutted, shells of existence without meaning. The most menial tasks like brushing our teeth or showering become enormous mountains to climb, great weights of resistance that paralyze with their senseless demands.

It would be best to protect from exposing any vulnerabilities to so invulnerable a master, to try to not notice or care that our cares are so insignificant to time. But when our defenses against time are breeched and it’s heartless presence violates our heart, its impersonal shatters our personal and turns our being upside down. We are drawn into its world where our personal is confounded, where good is evil and evil good; life is death and death, life. Only hopes that thrive on despair can live here, deformed and hideous but far more desirable than no hope at all. These hopes of despair cling in the end to suicide as the best of all possibilities, bartering life for death. Whoever lives in these realms for long becomes willing to choose suicide as the only possible rescue from time’s unbearable grip. Once despair’s hope is fulfilled for the one who kills herself, the living who suffer her death witness time continue as if no tragedy happened and the suicide meant nothing at all. Time proceeds unfazed, without pause or regret, never doubting its ways even of loss by suicide. It is merely time’s collateral damage, the risk those take who stray too close to its heartless presence where no one survives

Solomon believed that forgetting time is a kind of grace from God, Who puts gladness in our heart (5:20) to distract us from time. It is better to not see how blind time is to us. It is easier to live without considering how this time that so completely invades us registers nothing of our personal. Once we understand that time has no heart and no care for our being, it is best to protect our heart and turn from it. There is no place for our heart in time. All time knows to do with a heart is to decompose all that is personal in it and scatter it’s unidentifiable remains