Life is so long but it passes so fast
Waking up in my bed every morning, I spend the months in long underwater dives.
Yesterday, I was at a dinner table with people who were actual strangers just a year ago, my teacher was taking sweeping pans of all of us eating out of our pots surrounded by plates upon plates of red meat. Sitting now at my desk, I keep thinking about the way he cleaned his spectacles as it fogged up with steam from boiling soup and his reflection in the window. How blissful it is to share this meal, how happy it is to have people to share it with. To have food to eat, to have a quiet place to eat it in.
“Last year I didn’t have the mood to celebrate Chinese New Year; My wife used to cook those large meals for us and with her gone, there scarcely seemed a reason to eat.”
“But now, it seems like I have a new family to eat it with. And with the world opening up, it feels like my friends are coming back.”
I love him, I think to myself quietly, and everyone at the table loves him too. But our feelings are lost in the heat, the rush to eat, our desire to please him.
It’s Chinese New Year again, and sitting at my desk, I feel again that strange feeling of being displaced from my body.
Isn’t it so strange the way life changes? Isn’t it so strange the way life passes through us? It seemed scarcely believable to me four years ago that life was something that I possessed, before it became something that passed through me, before it became something that was marked by its place outside of me. What I mean is that life has become time, has become change. And in these changes, each season, I’ve begun to witness, to record, the way people have entered my life then fallen away. And as I became more and more observant, life became a riotous revolution of changes. Over and over, it seemed to me that the course of each day had become eternal, each moment shoring up on me like the handprint of a wave. Then days passed, then months, and slowly the coastline changed.
I’m different now, my life is different now, the people in my life are different now, the people I love are different now. The circular economy is the journey of how a single person’s need transforms into someone else needing them, no matter how many infinite steps it takes before someone needs them again. All this change had come as a result of my days, yet each day launched such vast sequences of dependencies which looped back into me in ways I could only appreciate much later. There were some disruptions, each choice is, yet by and large the circles were neat. They were clean. Life is so long, I keep thinking to myself. I live to experience the consequences of my every act. Life is so long and so short. One day it will end, I won’t be allowed to see things through.
I used to say “life is such a trip” at the end of every holiday, because it seemed just patently true that each day could be as long as a single life. When time passes smoothly, regular, I think of the empty hours I spend just relaxing mutely, and each of these mute days becoming nested permanently, classified under days of waste in the phylogenetic tree of my life. And then there are days when the whole world is inflamed with meaning, when “heaven and hell seemed centred within a single day”, and then those days too pass, hardened and stored forever in their rightful place. I cannot take back these days, I cannot un-spend my life, I cannot undo my decisions, no matter how consequential or inconsequential. Each laziness mattered, as did each effort.
And though life is an irrecoverable asset once squandered, I feel myself relax into it anyway. Life will be lived whether you form memories of life or not, and life will continue to accumulate into meaning as long as you keep on living it. The example that keeps repeating in my mind is that there is no real punishment for those who cut corners at work, no real punishment for those who create bureaucratic inefficiency by adding one extra feature without spending an equivalent amount on alignment and compression. Google continues to deteriorate. Sales deals, negotiations, are our best attempt at approximating optimum value. The world is full of messy things, people living their lives and making decisions half-heartedly because they were not in the right frame of mind to live their lives for the task which called out to them but which they ignored. A person mindlessly keys in measurements into the control panel of a machine, lazily experimenting for optimal yield while thinking about going home to their wife. Every day the world is created through the half-hearted efforts of others living half exterior lives. The world goes on existing. Everything else is internal, emotional, as they vacate the room of control to luxuriate in private feelings where time is frozen, where the external world ceases to matter. Surely it is okay for me to do the same with life, my life, decide only sometimes and otherwise retreat into myself. I’m nested that way. Every pain I’ve experienced in my life was the result of the carelessness of others in their external lives, and every pain I’ve inflicted was from my deliberate choice to remain careless. Yet, every joy was the result of what was careless for others too. I keep thinking that we are loose bodies, flinging ourselves at each other like long sausages, miraculously making it work. Life can be that too. Something may still work even when I spend the days carelessly.
In my days of slowness, I acknowledge that I speak in statements with no real development. I realise I write not because I’m interested in explaining or living through a moment with another person, but because I consider it a duty to leave a mark. “So and so lived here and thought this then,” so and so spoke in solipsisms. I spoke in solipsisms because by the time I wrote, I had already arrived. The memories I replay are best experienced in memory, not word. Some will become arguments in their time. I’m tired now of writing but the thing that is most important is carrying out my duty. Everything else I can be careless with. So writing to keep my footprint in the sand is what I will keep on doing.
