processing time

and the only effective act of rebellion i've found against it

A hike just outside Seattle on film, May 2021

There is something really special about the turn of a year coming when you feel ready for it.

My birthday was this past weekend. It was lovely. I spent it eating wonderful food, surrounded by people I love steeped in mutual appreciation for each other. So basically, my dream day.

I've noticed as I've gotten older that the number of loose-tie messages you get throughout the day of your birthday dwindles, but the meaningful messages you get grow more intentional and come in earlier throughout the day. Like, the people messaging me on my birthday actually knew my birthday was coming up. Because as you get older, your core circle contracts and intensifies. And I think that’s quite beautiful—to be increasingly surrounded by people who genuinely care about you, who are with you for years to come.

This brings up something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the passage of time.

I'm at this unique age where I seem very young to most people I work with, and somewhat older to a lot of the people I meet on here (the internet). It's given me this distinct vantage point on youth—to see it from the eyes of those younger and older than me, peeking into their unique definitions of what it means to spend time well.

I’ve learned a few things by pondering their perspectives and by paying close attention to how time passing feels on a personal level.

I've learned that time is the greatest teacher and simultaneously the greatest threat.

Time teaches us that some things need to pass only when they’re ready to, not before. 

Time teaches us that while you don’t act, you get older. Opportunities dissolve. Your desire grows weaker. Your sense of urgency wanes. Your drive fizzles.

This is what happens as youth evaporates. Not for everyone, of course. Some see this coming and are able to preserve their youthful spirit. They are able to anticipate the adverse affects of time passing. But not everyone. Most of us are just victims to time. Sucked into the vortex, getting spun around until our time is up, never really paying attention to how, why, and the way in which time is passing.

Time is also the one immutable thing that we all share. Experience, emotion, events, trauma—sure. Different flavours of these exist for everyone. But getting older? Everyone reading this can relate to the confusing task of processing the passage of time, a uniquely strange experience that is simultaneously the most universal one of all.

You can look around at anyone and guarantee that you all have at least one thing in common: you’re getting older, watching time pass by, puzzled at the speed with which life is moving, startled at the way memories blur into each other, at the way years zoom past us in a fuzzy flash.

I recently overheard something in a coffee shop conversation that really struck me. The conversation was between two middle aged men, probably in their fourties, talking about their youth. One of them mentioned something they did one summer, like “this happened in the summer of 1997”. And the other said, “hmm, summer of 1997... doesn’t stand out to me. Can’t recall what I did then.”

To some, it might seem obvious that as you experience more summers, fewer will stand out. Those not punctuated by significant events, experiences, or emotions might fade into the abyss of the mind.

But the idea of a complete summer blurring by and leaving no major mark on one’s life shook something deep in me. Like: is that going to be me in 20 years? forgetting an entire summer’s worth of experiences due to age?

At my ripe age, everything feels significant. Every weekend, every season, every milestone in my life. It is all there for a reason. It all feels memorable.

Of course, nothing is perfectly memorable. That is why I write. That is why I capture what’s happening to me through words—so I can look back and feel closer to my younger self. So I can immortalize my youth. So I can beat time in some strange way. Sure, I don’t have Hermione Granger’s time turner, but I have a notebook, a pen, and this keyboard—the three magical tools I use to capture my life. 

This past birthday is the perfect example of something I want to remember forever. So many beautiful moments happened this weekend, with so many beautiful people. These moments—in a week, a  month, a decade’s time—will all blur into each other and I’ll just remember this one as a “great birthday.” But that’s not all it was. It was special in a million ways and I want to remember them all.

So, I need to capture them. And not just with pictures. I do love pictures. I have far too many and clean them out far too rarely. But a picture merely captures a sight, a scene. It is literally the externalization of a moment: what someone sees from the outside looking in. But we have the privilege of actually experiencing these moments ourselves. Through our eyes, our own experience. And that’s what makes capturing moments through words so unique, so timeless. We get to look back on the experience. We get to look back on what it was like for us to be in that picture—what we were thinking about, how the moment changed us, shaped us, how it moved us towards the next one.

My friend has been on this incredible Europe trip recently, and she has been sending my friends and I daily updates that have absolutely blown me away. The updates don’t just outline what she did, but how she felt about what she did. Why she went to the restaurant, why she would/wouldn’t go back, what the vibe of the beach was like, how the people around her made her feel.

While reading her updates, it struck me how rarely we document how we feel about what we did, instead of just what we did. Ironically, the feeling—the experience—is the meat of the moment. Not the “what”, but everything else. To see that this is true, consider that you and I could have the exact same external experience and recall it completely differently. We could be in the same photo, both smiling, looking joyful and relaxed, while our internal states could be polar opposites. This is why capturing our unique experience is so critical.

Last summer, I went on a trip with my friends. We created a shared list of everything we did while we were away. When reading through it at the end of the trip, I found it striking how differently we recalled the same events. We were in the same photos, doing the 'same things', and yet if you took a mental snap shot of our internal experiences, those pictures would look very different.

Photos are like the cover of a book. Writing about moments is like opening the book and diving in. It takes you to a whole new world. It evokes the emotions you felt during that moment. It transports you back in time.

It’s surprising what you can see looking through the eyes of your past self. I’ve gotten emotional re-experiencing moments, teleporting myself back in time through an effectively captured mental snap shot. It’s startling realizing how cleanly my mind had sanitized a moment of its emotion through revisiting what I had written about it when it first occurred.

Our memory does a pretty poor job of storing emotions unless they’re peak emotions (either positive or negative). Sometimes, we don’t remember when things were just going well. When we were happy, at ease, and felt generally good. We seem to mostly remember the highest highs and lowest lows.

But life isn’t just about the euphoria and tragedy and drama that tend to punctuate time. Life is the rest of it. Life is the in between. It’s all the things that happened to that 40-year-old-man in the summer of 1997 that he doesn’t even remember. It’s the beautiful, simple experiences with your friends, partner, parents, siblings, pets, strangers—with yourself. Those moments that wouldn’t necessarily flash through the slideshow of your life at the end, but are what made the whole thing meaningful. The building blocks to the relationships that fill your life with richness. The foundation of peak experiences.

When we’re passively going through life, it’s nearly impossible to intuitively see the impact that moments are having on us. This only becomes clear through reflection, through conversation, through thinking, through writing. 

Because regardless of the attention we pay to them, these moments are shaping us. The time is passing. And the passage of time is one of those few things in life that is absolutely happening, no matter how you feel about it. And there’s only one effective act of rebellion against time’s passing that I’ve identified, and that’s to capture it rigorously, carefully, and intentionally. To capture it with care. With respect for yourself and your life. 

Because when we do, we can tap back into the feeling of youth whenever we want. And if we keep doing this, we can see things the way we saw them at any age—when we were 18, 25, 30, 50, 80. And don’t you want to be able to consult your past perspective when you feel like your sense of self is waning? I certainly do.

So, we can rebel against time’s passing through carefully capturing moments, but I don’t think there is any real way to beat time (at least, not yet).

This certainly hasn’t stopped us from trying, though. In fact, it’s kind of bizarre how obsessed society has become with trying to preserve the external form of youth, filling our faces and bodies with youthful plasticity in an attempt to immortalize our external vehicle. But I think we’re missing the point with these efforts. We spend so much time, effort, money trying to look younger, when the thing that makes youth so unique is how we feel when we’re young. Where’s the time, effort, money spent on trying to preserve our internal form? The part of us that actually shapes our experience: our perspective. Our minds.

The easiest way I’ve found to preserve the internal is to write. It’s like leaving breadcrumbs for your future self to trace back what you saw, how you felt, how your perspective has changed.

With another revolution around the sun, another year passing, so much has changed about me. I feel so different than I did one year ago! 

But one thing that doesn’t feel different, that seems to remain unchanged, that I can dissolve into no matter where I am, what I’m doing, what’s on my mind—is the harmonious connection between my hands and this keyboard. My eyes on this screen. Watching my experiences, my memories, my emotions, my life come alive once again, dancing across the screen through the words I spill onto it. Capturing and collecting those beautiful, simple, seemingly mundane experiences and moments that make life full, rich, well-lived.

Writing is what continues to feel immutably important. Because we can take lots of photos and keep ourselves looking young and healthy through whatever means we want, but if we can’t tap back into our youthful perspective, our mind, our memories… what’s the point? That is the thing that everyone loves and misses about youth. The way we feel when we’re young. The wide-eyed, optimistic, hopeful, un-jaded zest we have for life. And yeah, the soft skin, bright smiles, youthful glow is part of it, too. But that’s all just a vehicle for the experience of youth. A symbol of it.

We’re not even looking at the external version of ourselves throughout life. We’re looking out at life. We don’t experience life the way pictures capture it. We are looking at the camera, at the people, at the world. The perspective we see in pictures is the world's perspective on us, not our perspective on the world. And our perspective is the one that’s worth spending time capturing, working on, refining, preserving. The lens through which we see life. Not just the physical medium for it. 

It’s the feeling of youth we should be trying to protect. The feeling that you can do anything, be anyone, go anywhere. That feeling that you have your “whole life ahead of you.” (This is what someone said to me when they asked how old I was turning. And I was like: hey, so do you! But they don't feel that way because youth has this unique ability to dissolve the boundaries of what feels possible). 

It’s quite clear that people long for youth. Older people look at younger people enviously and want to be their age again. But I wonder if that would be the case if they captured their youth so well that they could re-experience it. To feel it all over again through the eyes of their past self. 

That’s what I hope I’m doing for my future self. By writing, sharing, recalling, conversing, capturing, and repeating that cycle perpetually. I want to be able to look back and know what it felt like to turn this age. I want to look back on the summer of 2022 and remember what happened. I refuse to have a summer as unmemorable and poorly captured as that man’s summer of 1997! I want every season of my life to be notable, to feel visceral, real, alive when I look back on it.

We only get one life, we only get youth once, but if we do it right and capture it carefully, we can experience it over and over for the rest of time (and maybe even pass it along to others who can experience it through our eyes as well). 

We can immortalize ourselves by regularly capturing our internal state. By re-living life through our youthful eyes, tapping into that perspective whenever we need it. 

We cannot beat time. But we can find ways to work with it, to embrace its passage and to lean into the process of growing older. We can use the passage of time to power and inform our aging perspective. 

And so, I welcome this year with exuberance, joy, openness, excitement, abundance, momentum, curiosity. I like the way I am evolving. I feel aligned with the person I am continuing to become.

And I am grateful to have the ability to write and capture that, because it is a privilege that many don’t have (and equally: one that many do have and choose not to engage in). And what a shame it would be to let time go on without reflecting on what it took with it as it went. Because at the end of the day, that’s all life is going to be—a giant flash of time passing. A big swoop of experiences and feelings and emotions and simple days and tragic ones and euphoric ones and everything else, all mashed into one continuum. And that’s beautiful and terrifying all at once.

And sending my hands dancing along these keys to write it all down is the only effective act of rebellion towards the passage of time that I’ve identified.

So, I guess that’s how I plan to stay young forever. Because if we can grow older and wiser, and still access our youthful spirit, that feels like one way to kind-of-sort-of-maybe beat time. And at the very least, it will keep us close to our youth in a way that keeps us from hopelessly longing for it as we age.

In the wise words of Charles Baudelaire:

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

But hey, I might be wrong. I mean… what do I know? I’m just some kid :)