fleeting moments

What I hate most about this blog is the element that I can't change.
I can't not write about moments that I have yet not experienced. 
But a cursory look at this godforsaken blog is yet another trivial account of youth graduating ever so ungracefully into age and (hopefully) wisdom. 
My experiences are (despite my internal protestations) universal; they are not unique and upon reflection, are veritably trivial. Yet they are mine own. So within owning ownership of my memories and moments, let us discuss. Time.

Of course, as a young one, I never gave time a fleeting thought. It wasn't until Jon's death that I even realized that there was an end to this consciousness, this being, the way of life that I had grown accustomed.  In the grand narrative of my life, Jon was a catalyst for many revelations; we used to spend many a night in his Jeep Cherokee discussing and dissecting the exigencies of both our existence and that of the human race and it's a credit to our friendship that even today, I continue to reflect on our conversations and see how those earnest investigations would apply even today.

But as is the way with most life experiences, we cannot understand them until we experience them ourselves. I recently got my wisdom teeth removed (everyone can breathe now). What petrified me most about the procedure was not the grisly process of digging out teeth and unrooting them from my mouth but the prospect of being put under, losing time only to be reoriented again with the normal way of doing things.

And as I sat there, tears streaming down my face, potentially facing the "end of my life" or my orientation with time itself, I thought about many things. I thought about how back in the day, people in small towns, in the middle of nowhere, had no concept of the time. The time on the clock at the local train station was literally miles away from the clock in the local general store. Wherever you were was the right time.

I thought about hummingbirds and humpback whales. To hummingbirds, we are slowly slovenly giants, lumbering around stumbling all over oneself. To whales, we are hummingbirds, flitting around from task to task, barely getting a chance to reflect or let alone, breathe.

I thought about who I was four years ago, even three years ago, even two years ago, even yesterday. I realized how quickly time slips through your fingers; it's literally a slippery process. One minute you have hours, the next you have seconds. One second you're 22 and impenetrable; the next you're 27 and you feel everything so viscerally it's difficult to think of letting anyone else in. It's so hard to remember to stop and feel, to stop and reflect. I don't want to spend my life remembering; I want to spend my life experiencing.