So, a lot of time has gone by since the last time I wrote... over a year, in fact. It doesn't seem like I've neglected my webpage for a year (at least my journal section), but then again, it's hard to believe that a month has gone by since I graduated from college. We can mark the passage of time with our clocks, waste our days away watching an hour of TV here, a 3 hour movie there, working eight hour (or more) days, and making trips out of town to visit relatives on the weekend. We watch holidays come and go, seasons change, and we tear one more sheet off the daily calendar. But at the same time we say, "It seems like only yesterday ________________." ...You fill in the blank.
Why do some things remain fresh in our memory while others fade? "It seems like ages ago that _________________." To me, it seems like ages ago that I started working on cleaning up my room, when in fact, it was only about 8 1/2 hours ago. But it seems like it was only a few months ago that I was in the midst of my freshman year of college. (In reality, it was 3+ years ago.) Maybe the things that matter the least fade from memory faster, and so seem farther away. While those things that affected us most linger at the forefront of our memories, cheating us into believing that they only recently came to pass.
Sometimes I know that we all wish we were as efficient as a clock or a calendar, which forgets every minute, hour, or day as soon as it has passed. But then I am reminded of the old saying of, "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater." We wish for that efficiency when we're faced with a painful or difficult situation; at the time, it so consumes our every waking (or sleeping) thought that we want to forget everything we ever knew. But then there are those moments we wish we could stop time, to live inside that moment forever. Would you really be willing to give up those memories in order to rid yourself of the bad ones too? I don't think I would. Because those times when the years compress and the past is painfully close, I can retreat into a quiet place of peace and joy, equally long gone, and dwell there a while longer 'til the timeline smooths out and the clock goes back to its steady tick, marking the passage of time. |