Time is the reducer, breaking us down into historical bits, the
hash marks of a timeline whose far right end is an arrow. Time is the
sieve through which we press our memories, each layer scissor cutting them finer and finer, as the ground skin of nutmeg creates mace, another version of itself. It is the thing we want more of yet long to speed up. It is the
ironic and
hypocritical power that is so often beyond us.
Now we have all the ways to stop or lessen the severity of its presence on our bodies. Every day some new cream or pill can add years to our flesh. Even further, the act of convincing us that we have repressed memories, that there is more to what we remember than we were ever aware, lends us to think we can abate time or that we had already done it until someone came along to remind us of the contrary.
You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.
It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence.
Douglas Coupland
While I do not depend on the above statement to be true or false for me to have a valued sense of time, it is one of many sentiments being passed around, one that often causes people to feel that time and circumstance have already beaten them.
So, in the tradition of this nodeshell, I would say this. I believe that time is the fire in which we are burned, but we are also tempered by that fire, not consumed by it in a void. It causes us to not think too lofty of our existence, to be certain, but we are made stronger the longer we stay in the fire.