EMIT//TIME

(Shillong years and years back)

We can travel only in one direction in time. The concept of multi-directional travel in time has inspired legends from HG Wells to Albert Einstein to Christopher Nolan. All of them have remoulded time in literature, science and cinema. But we are still bound by the ticks of the clock.

Einstein said, “ Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions by which we live.” Yet if we erase the concept of time from our heads, will we become Benjamin Buttons, reliving our lives in reverse or will time still pass by- not in terms of seconds and minutes but days and nights?

The tight structure of time has wrapped us in cocoons. The alarm, the deadlines and the date sheets: they mark out the movement of the human mind, erasing the role that nature plays in deciding time’s path. I have worked out my days in terms of the next exam, the next college admission and the next goal. I’ve been chasing mirages thinking I’m moving forward but remaining in the same place essentially.

Learning to watch rain drop one by one and then in a burst of tears- has become unknown. My brain has marked that ‘unproductive’, a ‘waste of time.’ A waste of ‘time’. The time that I constructed in my head and not the time that nature goes by. If I followed nature’s ‘time’ it would indeed make more sense to watch the rain descend on earth, feel and know the change in the season and thereby the change in the year.

It was simple for me, for you-wasn’t it? We just had to travel straight ahead in time, with time’s pace. But we rushed time in our minds to travel multi-directional. We travelled to our yesterday and to our tomorrow, challenging physics and laws of nature. In return, time has lost us and we have lost time.

The world around us promotes working through sweat and blood. We are given images of people who didn’t sleep at nights. And unknowingly we have glorified wrong concepts. We forget that when Freddie Mercury worked for days and nights at a stretch for composing music and when Ruth Bader Gindsburg forgot what sleep was- they were following passion not goals. They were following love and not success. And even they paid a price for it, didn’t they? They found themselves battling aids and cancer. While we promoted that image of people who made it big, we forgot that they truly achieved big things when they made peace with life and let things be.

We try working too hard for success, for achievement. We battle time against all odds. Time brings us down. Even as just a concept, just an ‘illusion’ as Einstein would call it, time proves mightier. So let’s learn to flow with it. Let us provide ourselves some space, some break to move with the flow of time. It doesn’t mean not working hard. It means not working at the cost of time’s pace for us. It is knowing that time is not rushing us but we rushing it.