REFLECTIONS

I am sitting here at the table, watching the bright screen of this computer and try to comprehend the value of time. I am not thinking about a monetary value, but at the importance of time in our lives.

There was a certain stage, earlier in my childhood, which lasted steadily throughout teenage hood and early adulthood, when time seemed to have been in abundance. The passing of days and nights used to be just a chain of events, intensively or passively lived, then the anticipation of future events was filled with excitement. Optimism reigned, confidence and positive thinking were always a presence. It may have been just me, or just a few lucky ones like me, that lived happily in the bosom of a decent family.

Later, it seemed like the days had started to fly. At the beginning, there was a slow takeoff, then the speed and altitude increased consistently.

Humans are bound to restrictive outcomes of rationality. We need to classify, to assess, to anticipate and to act cautiously. We are trying to build an environment that presents the safest of guards possible, and that’s because we are aware of our temporality. Death frightens us more than anything, but we are perfectly aware of its crude reality. Our life is filled with the chain of moments between our birth and our passing, but isn’t that enough? Or should I say, it should be enough because that is all we have?

The passage of time is a concern. Everybody around agrees time is never enough, the days are passing by rapidly. One time, I woke up a little earlier than I was supposed to and fell back asleep for those remaining minutes before the alarm would go on. During that sleep, I had a dream, and that dream covered a lot of events unfolded over a long period. When the alarm rang, I woke up, jumped on my feet, awake but still being shallowly sank into that dream. I realized between the early wake and the latest rise, only two minutes have passed. Then, how could I have dreamed about such a long extent of time? Illusions and dreams are just an escape from reality.

Stubborn as we are, we try to either climb or descend the mountain, as reaching the top will put us on the top of the world, or finding the rich valley will give us the riches we want. We rarely look at the middle path, the one that follows a gentle slope, the one that can give us both.

Courageous and cowards, rich or poor, strong or weak, is what we think we are, but aren’t we mainly a combination of all of them?!

We probably are, but that will not suffice because we are directed by extremes, by the attractiveness of significant achievements and the disaster of monumental failures.

Trying to end this brief text, I’m overwhelmed by contempt because I was trying to conclude this with a valuable finding, instead I found it not, and I realize that, unwillingly, I followed the middle path.