Two Hundred and Eighty Eight Hours Later and I’m Romanticizing the Slow

Month by month, we’re inching towards the halfway mark of the year. So much has happened and so much has yet to happen. Starting off the month in complete isolation has left me reflecting about time.

Here I am, given a gift of hours, days, and a little over a week to myself, a whole two hundred and eighty eight hours to be myself and what have I accomplished? I’ve been given the permission to have time for myself to do what? What have I done?

I remember sitting in silence in my room every couple of days, with all this time, trying to count something, anything, to prove that I was a decent human being who was accomplishing something. It’s this word, accomplishment, and it’s this action, counting, that led me to start thinking about time and everything its existence brings into our lives.

The way we interpret time, the way we quantify it and define the quality of it, is so structured and loaded with rigid societal ideals. We’re taught from a very young age that we need to be able to master time, now, so that we can use it to our advantage and do the most and a little bit more to guarantee ourselves a perfect life.

I’ve come to the realization that I’ve been romanticizing the idea of perfection way too much. All my life, people have been telling me that I need to “be this”, “get this done”, “have this”, “let go of this”, all so that I can save time or get ahead in reaching perfection. I’m told that I need to be more while still being less so that tomorrow, in the future, I’ll have the most. And if I don’t do all this now, I’m going to run out of time and inch away from achieving true perfection that promises endless happiness and fulfillment.

Our society contributes and fuels this way of thinking in ways that we don’t even realize until we’re much older and feel that something’s missing. Because all this time, we’ve been running ahead towards something that will disappear if we’re not out of breath by the time we accomplish it. And while we’re running ahead, trying to reach this certified “perfect” finish line, we’re running past parts of our lives we could have truly found joy in.

I need to romanticize the now and I need to romanticize the slow. Perfection isn’t ideal, in fact, it’s the infinity of our existence. You can get close to it but never truly reach it. Perfection is something that Icarus would believe in. He’d believe in the kind of perfection in which you can have it all and touch the sun unscathed. He didn’t take it slow like his father, Icarus wanted it all, and he wanted it now. Happiness, self contentment/satisfaction, whatever perfection may mean to you isn’t something you get all of without loosing pieces of yourself in the process. It’s not something that you have to fight every minute of your life for and it’s not something you have to bend the rules of time to get things done now. It’s something to work towards, something to slowly reach for, inch by inch, *brick by brick, and take it all in at your pace. A pace that reflects you and only you so that you don’t take the fast trip down the road and loose yourself in the race and so you can find your own piece of joy along the way.

All this is to say that after two hundred and eighty eight hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to loose anymore of myself.

I want to live with the sun on my back and my dreams in front of me.

I want to take it slow.

* Yes, I did just insert a Kaz Brekker quote in here.