Time travels

journeys past and forwards, clouds and memories

Begin, just begin.

Where does time begin, where does it end? Perhaps it doesn’t do any of those things. Perhaps that is why it has been so difficult for me to get started on writing this post. Like a circle rolling endlessly round and round, I don’t have a starting point.. not exactly, but feel pulled in various directions. I could begin anywhere - which is  both beautiful and frightening at once. Or perhaps I was just taking advantage of ‘time’ and procrastinating.

‘Let life decide. Don’t stop. Be right back—’ this is what I told myself as I rambled on to the next location. I was travelling, and trying to travel ‘yin’ — calmly and with full bellied consciousness, but I could barely catch my breath. Next mission, next mishap — ambling against time, against instinct. I was twenty two and in transit. I did not know where I was going, and at the time, before I learnt how bad it could get when you have no plan As or Bs, all I knew was that no matter what, I was going to ‘let life decide’ — I was going to experience the passage of time, volunteer in community across the world and let the places and people along the way bring colour and beauty back into life.

“Try not to resist the changes that come your way.

Instead let life live through you”

— Rumi.

Life happened, it certainly did, and so did the dream — but not in the way I once expected. Life moved so fast I forgot the dreams the moment they manifested. Such is the chocolate box of existence, a beating of wings.

Depression is a very complicated illness, but I believe much of the problems arise when we are too ‘at home’ in time, or too deeply embedded in ourselves and our own thoughts. To step out a little, and let it tickle, that is where the darkest and stormiest things happen and often, those are what call us back to the light.

I am not saying bounce off with a backpack and figure the rest out. To never plan, never stop moving until spirit flies — but instead to play around a little.

Don’t let the darkness and heaviness of life cement you further into the concrete castle, the heaviness it takes to build, grow and stay put. Continue to explore, make space, create.

Find a little slack, or cut yourself some — between one shoulder blade and the next, or the midway point of an argument, where both sides meet and make amends.

Learn through being — being with others. The gifts are already here and all along, but sometimes it takes getting shaken up and tossed about and erased, to sparkle life once more inside.

Time changes us, inside and out. Time grieves, time throws us forward into the deep end before (we think) we’re ready.

Being in time is somewhat of a precarious place to be — to grieve constantly for what once was, to imagine something in the so-called future, to be bound forever by memory and wishful thinking. I would argue that we are both here and not here, with one toe in the future and one in the past.

But here in the now, as I write this, I am shaping my identity, I am creating my own reality. 

And yet I have lost the plot entirely, in fact, I have already left. What you are reading now is in the past, it is no longer, and yet it longs for a moment in the future, when someone’s eyes shall find it. We are here and then we aren’t – now you see me, now you don’t. 

Perhaps this is what poetic phycisit Rovelli means when he describes ‘Now’ as an illusion, comparing it to the elusive rainbow that wanders away from us: “We think that we can see it - but, if we go to look for it, it isn’t there”. We will live this moment again, but in a slightly different way - life is creating itself in fresh ways, each and every day. There is no use in holding when time is dragging at the seams. 

The only option we have, at any given moment, is to let time take us somewhere. I once bit into the juiciest, freshest mango on planet earth. It was newly plucked from the tree at a somewhat divine rainforest ashram in northeast Australia. Mango juices dripping down my chin, sweat dripping from my brow, the only thing I felt was love and I asked: “Where are you taking me, sweet mango?” as I closed my eyes.  

Time slowed down in those moments, it was just me and mango and I turned positively orange. But even those moments didn’t last forever. It is quite like being in a dream you do not want to wake from -