Column

Why reinvent an elegant saying when you can borrow one from a master. In this case Pink Floyd, specifically Roger Waters, who wrote the following for their song, Time.

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”

I don’t have a lot of fears and at the same time I do. That is a strange oppositional idea, I know. I don’t like heights, but that is more a vertigo thing. Rollercoasters make me motion sick, but that is not a fear of the coaster, it’s the desire to not waste the one-million-dollar corn dog at Disneyworld. Bugs, snakes, people – none of these things give me fear. What scares me is time.

I have recently examined my own anxieties and depression to try to find the root cause of it, to find the “cure”. I realize that the root of my fear is the passage of time.

Two and a half years ago my wife passed away. Since then, I have fought with myself pretty consistently. Made some poor choices and have struggled. I have tried to come to the root of my own chaotic mind, and I think that much of my fear can be correlated to the sharp juxtapose in my relative perception of time passing.

We experience time through the lens of our own observations. Everyone knows that when you are having fun, time flies, when you are in the pit of misery – it crawls. If you are afraid of the end, then your time on this Earth draws ever closer to the penultimate moment. When you are “shorter of breath and one day closer to death,” * our brains are incentivizing us to be miserable.

A weekend sitting alone, contemplating your trials and tribulations of the past and what you expect to face in the future draws the present to an absolute crawl. You feel every second go by and time extends torturously slowly, but this seemingly endless period of misery slows down your life and delays the inevitable end. Do you think that is by design that the bad times and how we perceive them in time, are a failsafe to allow our minds to extend our lives and create a greater sense of fulfillment at the end?

If our lives were all good times, we would blink and it would be over. Do we need to feel the misery in order to experience our lives for a longer period of relative time? If you talked to a person in the twilight of their lives, would a person who suffered less hardship say that their life was adequate, or would they languish that they didn’t have enough time. What about a curmudgeon? Would they say that their life was long, and speckled therein were moments of joy, but the relative length of their existence on this plane was sufficient. Which is better? I guess it depends on your belief structure and your fear.

I am afraid of death. Of running out of time. But am I? Am I afraid of the moment or the penultimate moment? Depending on your beliefs, the moment of death is either nothingness, or a transition to something new. I don’t know if I believe in heaven, but I am no atheist. I believe that that knowledge is unknowable until the moment. So I don’t fear the moment of death itself. What I fear is the moment just before that.

I have been assaulted with existential dread at times about that exact moment. Would it be temporally locked? Would the misery and fear of that moment extend it to such a degree as to be relatively endless? How torturous would that be if true? Seemingly, the worst the moment to your observation, the slower the moment passes, so if that penultimate moment is the worst moment of your life, it would make sense that you would perceive that moment as the longest relative to your life.

I think about my wife in hospice, disease ravaged and lying there dying. To me those hours passed like the sailing stones in Death Valley. Movement imperceivable to me, but not stopped.

That was the worst moment of my life thus far and the slowest. How was it for her? Is she still feeling it in relative time? Two and a half years have passed for me, but is she still at the moment? I can think of no more frightful thing on this Earth. Thankfully, maybe, she was aestheticized.

When you are aestheticized, you are not only unable to feel pain, those drugs also work by desyncing your mind from the passage of time and stopping you from making memories. Effectively accelerating your perception to the speed of light. That’s the magic of the drug, not to suppress pain but to erase the period of pain from your perception. In that way a patient in hospice would accelerate past that penultimate moment at the speed of light. It would be imperceptible to them. Is this a gift, or a robbery?

I don’t know, but the sun always rises “and you run and you run to catch up to the sun but it’s sinking and racing around to come up behind you again.” *

You can’t outrun time, but that act of running, both painful and pleasurable, slows time as well.

Maybe that’s the key, finding the balance between pain and pleasure to optimize the passage of time to your unique perspective. I don’t know the answer, but thinking about it has slowed the passage and now “the time is gone the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.” *

*Time, by Pink Floyd, Lyrics by Roger Waters.