#65: Time Is A Choppy Sea

ESSAY

In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have determined that time is not a flat circle. It’s a choppy sea. As the wave of summer crashes into my fragile, sunburnt body, churning me up and spitting me out with the surf, this makes total sense. I mean, not in Einstein’s long-theorized space-time waves way. Unfortunately, we didn’t cover that in Astronomy 101. I can’t make sense of the science, though I trust the nerds (she said lovingly) got this one right. I mean, it makes sense in the way that time has never felt flat or circular or fixed.

How often has time slowed in a moment of panic or anxiety or crisis? How many times have I sat down to write and looked up ten minutes later to find that hours had passed? How often have week-long vacations passed in mere moments and work days dragged on for years? Of course time is an ocean. Fickle and powerful beyond our wildest dreams.

Time is a choppy sea, and Adam and I have a surf lesson we’ve been putting off scheduling. That part refers to surfing the literal liquid ocean a few blocks from our apartment (#brag) (#thankyouKarenandBrucefortheballerChristmasgift) (#KarenandBruceareAdamsparentsincasethatwasunclear), but if there’s a lesson out there for learning how to surf the waves of time, sign me up.

I remember a conversation in college in which someone mused on the phenomenon that our perception of the speed of time increases as we get older because the longer we’ve been alive, every metric of time becomes a smaller portion of our life. A year to a 6-year-old is basically an eternity. That’s 1/6 of their life! A year to a 60-year-old is, I assume, a much more fleeting-feeling 1/60 of their experience. This blew my mind. I feel like I should insert some sort of “high thoughts” joke here, but I was sober because I’m a control freak who doesn’t like to impair my senses and also because the one time I tried smoking, my “high thoughts” were not soul-shaking revelations. They were paranoid intrusions that people wanted to kill me. A great example of an evening in which time trickled on for what felt like many moons.

Maybe it’s the water sign in me (happy cancer season, bbs!), but time being an ocean feels like a homecoming of some sort. We’re all bobbing around in the sea of time. Our greatest minds are out discovering that our fundamental understanding of the universe has been off all this time. Summer is chugging along filled with plans and sand and a long list of to-dos that don’t seem to want to get done. It all feels like high tide, and I’m happy to get my feet wet.

I really loved this post from Rae Kats’ newsletter Inner Workings this week. Writing is such a continually iterative process it’s important to remember that the failures are part of the work. The soft confidence she describes is something I continually strive for. Writing life can feel so solitary, all this chatter between my mind and me, it’s nice to indulge in some writerly camaraderie in posts like these.

Soft Confidence

Are you a writer? I’d love to know how many Respectful Smartass readers are writers of their own. Let me know in the comments, and if you’re so inclined, please link to your work so we can read!

How do you surf the waves of time? Do you let them crash over you as you bubble in the surf? Are you out there floating along on a buoyant raft of presence? Did time ever feel like a flat circle to you? I want to know all the things.

Hope you have a glorious, sun-filled weekend.

ily bye,

Ariana