Countdown

Keeping time

Another year has come and gone and it has been quite an eventful year, especially after last week. But looking back, it seems like the last three years of my life have been eventful and rather interesting to say the least. Perhaps, it is simply that life just gets more and more complicated with each passing year. Or maybe it is the vagaries and uncertainties of working life and the lack of a prescribed horizon that blurs the lines; I can't quite say for sure. I would like to see the trials of the past few years as the growing pains of my adulthood, because the metamorphosis into adulthood does not take place overnight - growing always involves some pain. So, a new year, a new day, a new beginning and today I am no longer the person I was yesterday. It is all about time and timing, apparently.

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assures us passes regularly: tick tock, click clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
~Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending