Putting up with Time's Bullshit

I am a patient man because I will wait patiently for something worth waiting for (for something for which to wait -- oh screw the ending in a preposition thing). However, I'm growing rather tired of putting up with time's shit. What do I mean? Well, at the risk of sounding like an absurdist or going off on some nihilistic rant, I don't like the fact that time just goes forward while pushing me along with it. I am reluctant to let go of the past. One of my best friends says I have a problem with the past -- that in some ways I live in the past.

After sorting through a bunch of internal issues, I could only conclude that I am temporally (not temporarily) insecure. Part of this stems from having a very strong memory. I can go back in time easily in my head and relive past emotions, past loves and past experiences that brought me happiness with ease. I can remember the sensations of touch, scents and, with perfect clarity, can recall the sights and sounds of moments that filled me with intense happiness.

It would be foolhardy to believe that life was meant to only be a series of moments that were extremely special. Part of what makes a moment special is the uniqueness of that moment compared with the ordinaryness of every other moment. It is the old cliche "in order to fully understand what it means to be hot, one must have once been cold." Now that does not mean that we cannot partially understand the sensation of being hot without suffering from being cold, but the contrast between the two brings a sort of duality of experience into our lives.

I have loved. I have lost. I sat down the other day asking myself over and over, "is having loved and lost better than never having loved at all," really just a bunch of bullshit? So then I thought about it in terms of hot and cold. When one loves another, they are expressing an emotion opposite of hatred. Between these two extremes is the emotion (or arguably the lack thereof) of indifference. Upon meeting someone, we quickly decide whether we will lean towards love or hate -- we seldom remain indifferent towards people.

In that regard, love and hate are balanced perilously on the tip of a needle. When we invite someone into our heart (in terms of a relationship), we open ourselves up to a lot of possible damage. We take these risks through a leap of faith that the rewards will outweigh them. Opening one's heart is a one-way road. Once opened, the Rubicon is crossed while Ceaser marches proudly towards Rome.

So then I thought about the scope of the question. Losing a love recently served as a catalyst for all this thinking. I got mad at time. I got mad at love. I ran out in a rainstorm with a tall metal rod and screamed at God to bring it on. That's what love can do to a man. Anyhow, the question -- is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

Well, let's look at it from the perspective of time-flow that goes forward (the one we are used to). You meet someone, you fall in love, you make the conscious decision to open your heart, you share happy memories, the shit hits the fan and then you find yourself sitting on a bench in the rain crying your eyes out wondering just what in the hell went wrong. Days go by and you are still feeling the doom and gloom of a lost love. Weeks go by and you feel the after-effects of a broken heart. Months go by and you collect yourself and move on, but you find yourself occasionally thinking about your previous lover. Years go by and all you have is an occasional reminder that sparks a memory and then a quick, "what if," enters the mind and life goes on. However, you are NEVER the same person you were before meeting them.

Now, let's get mad at time. It is time's fault, right? Because at some point in time, he or she loved you and at some point you loved them. There was that magical point where you both loved each other at the same time. That's the special moment that we cherish -- that creeps into our minds when we least expect it. Even though the relationship failed and he or she went on to marry someone else, we carry these memories of what could have been and that seems to satisfy us enough to keep us somewhat happy.

The problem with having a good memory, though, is that sometimes those beautiful moments are very hard to let go. We associate the moment with the person (as we should, since they shared it with us). If we could suddenly flip the lever and send time going backwards, we'd suddenly notice something odd. Buildings springing up instantly while others are slowly disassembled (basically the exact opposite of how things occur in a time-forward viewpoint). We slowly start falling back in love with that special person. Pain slips into confusion while confusion slips back into solid love. Things are great again! Things are exactly as they once were. We are back in those special moments. Hold on, though -- because time isn't stopping! Suddenly we feel the love quickly fade and then suddenly we can't even remember who we were just hugging. All memories of that person are completely erased from existence.

So, going backward in time really solves nothing, because now we're at a greater disadvantage -- we can't even remember the people we had relationships with. So ultimately the solution must be to find a special moment that we treasure and stop time and live in that moment forever. Well, if time really is frozen, how can we really feel anything? How do we grow as a person? We can't grow -- we can't even ungrow -- we just stick. Alright, so freezing time was stupid -- how about we just keep replaying a special moment over and over like an old 8-track. We go through it once and then twice and we are amoured by that special person. Three, four, five and then six times. Sooner or later we suddenly realize that we've run the moment into the ground. I call this the "hot tub" syndrome. Getting into a hot tub feels great for the first minute, but once our body adjusts to the water, it isn't quite as pleasurable. We can't make the water any hotter because we're already at our threshold, so we just have to enjoy the sensation while it lasts because it shortly dies. If you sit in a tub long enough, the water get warm and then cool. Then you step out and start shivering -- hot and cold, love and hate, time running backwards and forwards.

We can't play just one moment that is special over and over, we have to keep finding new moments -- we have to diversify. However, in order for this to happen, there must be some flow of time. We've already determined that a failed relationship is doomed on both ends of time, and moving backwards gives us moments we can cherish yet never remember. The only solution would be for time to move forward -- so that we can both cherish and remember those moments. The echo of that love carries forward in time throughout the rest of our lives. Sure, we will love others, but all of these moments, experiences and echoes eventually make us realize something even greater.

It isn't necessarily loving another that we were only after -- it was learning to love ourselves. To forgive ourselves of the mistakes we made with past lovers -- to forgive them for theirs. It is that marching of time going forward that lends us the opportunity to mend a broken-heart and learn to love again no matter how much pain we experience from a freshly broken one.

Idealistically, I want to say that loving and losing is always better than never having loved at all -- because even if we fail to cultivate the relationship, we have succeeded in learning something greater about ourselves. Ideally, we would recognize those special moments in time when they first started to occur and heighten our awareness of our environment. We would relish the fact that we exist while walking around touching things and staring at different things while thinking, "I am now beginning a special moment, I want to take in as much of this as possible and cement this memory in my heart."

Only then can we move forward and grow as a person when we feel that love continues to fail us. Only then can we learn that love isn't a win or lose proposition, but an eternal learning experience that puts us more in touch with ourselves.