A teacher once told me that in high school, every class lasts forever, but the years fly by. It’s so true. Same thing happens in college—the weeks last a lifetime, but the semesters fall between your fingers like dropped coins. Coins worth $40,000, perhaps, but coins nonetheless.
And now—when it’s nighttime, it feels like the day flew by, but at work each hour lasts a week. And now—with less than a month left before my boyfriend returns from his semester in Mexico, each week feels like a month, and this last month feels like a year.
I try to tell myself to live in the moment. After all, life is like, 80% waiting. It’s just hard to live in the moment when the moments in the future and in the past seem so much better than the one I’m in now.
It’s sad that each night is joyful because it’s another day I can cross off on a calendar. But it’s also motivation to make the future better than it is now. To make the future’s grass the vibrant green I hope it will be.
Sometimes it feel like I’m passing through life on a subway, looking out the window. Like I’m going through it passively, doing what I’m meant to do, arriving on time, trying to interfere with the clockwork world as little as possible. I wish I tore through my days like a motorcycle slicing through the wind. I wish I devoured every second with insatiable hunger, but life isn’t like that.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how stories function, in preparation for my A-Z Challenge in April. Stories, by definition, have a beginning and an end. They are satisfying. Even stories that are unsatisfying are satisfying in how they leave you wanting more. Life isn’t like a story. Life doesn’t follow the rules of literature.
In life, people die in the middle of their plots. Plots begin and end without pomp and circumstance. Lives do the same. A life never ends with a marriage or a promotion or a vacation or a graduation, it just keeps on going, and going, and going, until a random moment in time when it doesn’t.
Life doesn’t follow a plot structure, and that’s why it’s often uninteresting. Regardless, we must push on, through day-long years and year-long days. In the end, it’s all worth it.
Introvert Playground 
‘Enjoy the endless days of youth
For they will end too soon’
Quote from somewhere or other … the memory loss is kicking in!
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Which A to Z challenge are you doing? I’m interested myself (my apologies if you’ve already said and I’ve missed it somewhere)
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I’m doing the one for April, with a theme of creative writing. I’ll be posting a bit of my own fiction every day, based on the letter of the day:) there’s a site somewhere to sign up!
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I wish I could make those minutes turn to hours, and hours to days when I wanted them that way. Naturally, they always behave that way only when unwanted. The rest of the time, time itself seems too valuable and limited in such an overwhelming and daunting way to me, that I squander that valuable currency in wanting to just drift and escape and not think about time and it’s most efficient and effective use. I like your motorcycle metaphor; I also wish I devoured time – approached it proactively rather than reactively. A contradiction of mine I find – I hate wasting time and am always trying to multitask or make the most of periods of time I see as useless to my life goals (example: I typically try to draw or do something besides just sit there if I’m watching t.v or movies) but then when I do have free time to work on what would be most important, I whittle it away wondering and worrying on what I should do, skirting around the challenging issues, and generally wasting my time or making only minimal progress. I escape into moments too often, shutting out everything else, and end up on a longer waiting list for things I really want to accomplish than I need to be on because of this, I think. Anyway, rambling at this point, just a fellow introvert-as-of-late (I seem to be bipolar in the extrovert/introvert scale with ups and downs represented in years) venturing the toss of a message-in-a-bottle to another time-feeler.
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In one of my history classes in college we spent a while looking into the historical importance of time, and how when clocks became more widespread and then individual pocket watches became more of a thing, people’s attitudes about time changed. These days I feel like we’re forever in a time crunch, always aware of the minutes, always thinking or at least half thinking about time management and to-do lists for the hour, day, week, and month. I’d love to work a much more relaxed attitude towards time into my novel.
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That’s very true. I remember learning that before factories people didn’t really need to know the time–they worked by the sun. Time management is huge, now. Very interesting, I didn’t think of that!
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That was it, factories. I knew there was a part I was forgetting. *adds to world building notes on what I don’t want*
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