my Grudge against Time

Dear Reader,

(Note: I was suppose to post this one on the 11th of November but my internet has been down for about five days now so I've only just been able to complete this post.)  

Back in 2006 - which is quite some time ago now - my friend, Codename: The Artist, recommended a book to me that at the time sounded incredibly interesting. So I noted down the title and author, and then thoroughly forgot about it. The book would go on to become a International best-seller and would be turned into a financially successfully film in 2009. This book of course was The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. 

Yet I still didn't read it. Even though I had a copy of the book all this time. The book just sat there in the corner of my room, gathering dust, watching as I read every other book in the unread pile, re-reading books I'd read a dozen times already. I don't have any explanation as to why I didn't read it. As you can probably image, this is quite a mystery to me since I very rarely leave a book I own unread. 

But yesterday, 8th November, I finally watched the film version of the The Time Traveler's Wife with my brothers and I have to admit, if it wasn't for the nudity, I would have really liked the movie and even recommended it to people. And I do believe that I'm actually, finally, going to read the book now (after I finish reading Maps of Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam). This is the first time I'm going to read the book because-of/after-watching the film version, rather than the other way round (which is normally the case). 

So anyway, the film got me thinking of "Time" itself and how we perceive it. For example, in the last three paragraphs (discounting the use in the title of the book) I used the word "time" six times. Hahaha, that last "times" was unintentional but proves my point exactly. The English language has so many uses of the word "time" with such varying meanings and context. It all get quite confusing some times. 

But going back to what I've been wanting to say...

Seconds, hours, years, centuries are just our way of measuring something quite insubstantial, like pain. And to think that so much of our lives are centred around this intangible concept: we plan out the hours of our day, our weeks, our years. So many of our decisions are based on how much time we have; from the most mundane to the most significant. As a consequence, we humans living in the 21st century, spend so much of our "time" watching time, and watching it fly past us. 

Courtesy of djibnet.com 

Being both a city dweller and a Muslim (with our five daily prayers and all), I keenly feel Time as a constant presence racing beside me, ahead of me. There is so much I want to do, have to do, but there are just not enough hours in the day and definitely not enough days in a year. And because I have such precious little time, I tend to priorities almost everything in my life, making mental and physical lists (as can be seem by the state of my bedroom notice board below). 

Unfortunately, the things that find themselves on the bottom of my lists usually end up left undone. These things tend to include: my poetry, my novel writing, long phone calls/notes/e-mails to friends I haven't seen/spoken/written to in ages. So I'd personally like to apologise to all those people in the last category, especially my pen-pal-friend on Shelfari Codename: So-Much-to-Read-So-Little-Time, who hasn't heard from me since August. I'm Sorry. 

Now that that's off my chest I feel a lot better.

So I believe that Time - like Truth - is subjective. Changing it's flow depends entirely on ones perception of it. That quite nicely explains why time seems to move faster when you're busy and much slower when you're not. But, when put that way, in the end it means that my lack of time (and therefore my "grudge" against it) is completely, 100%, my own fault. Can't say I blame myself though. Hardly five minutes go by without me doing something. I hate the feeling of doing nothing, it feels like wasting time. (I'm actually quite a fidgety and impatient person in the solid-non-internet world.)

So that about sums up what I want to say. I hope this post has left with you, my dear reader, with something to thing about. If not, then at the very least, I hope I haven't bored/confused you. I promise the next post will be coming to your monitors soon. Until then...

Nida