Thursday 4 December 2014

This Moment

My incredibly cool philosophy professor once said that memory is time. If we have no memory of what has just happened, there's no way of knowing that time has passed. It is kind of mind boggling really. Imagine if all the clocks in the world went back an hour, and you had memory of what you had been doing in that period, you would know that the hour did pass. (Or maybe you'd just think you're going mad.) Now, what if when all the clocks went back, you forgot the entire hour and whatever you experienced during it. There's no way of knowing time passed, is there? Scary.

Time really is an arbitrary concept if you think about it. When you're with friends or family, it swooshes by. What, has it been four hours already? you ask. Now what about the times that you spend waiting for someone to come or something to happen? It seems like time is crawling and each minute feels longer than a day; painful and never ending. It seems like time punishes those that keep track of it; the more you are aware of it, the more it keeps you aware of itself. You stop caring about it and it lets you be, it paces away. It just does the opposite of what you want it to do: you want it to stop, it races; you want it to pass, it goes into slow-motion. Time is a stubborn, stubborn bastard.

As my favourite moments go by, I just stop for a second and tell my people: hold on, stop talking for a second. I want to remember this moment and how happy we are in it. I want to think back and remember exactly how you look, how there are small creases at the corner of your eyes as you smile, how crooked your teeth are, how the laughter starts bubbling in my stomach and overflows till it reaches my lips. I want to remember everything, everything as it is in this moment.

When I do that, it doesn't matter how fast or how slow time goes. I don't mind it cheating me of my best moments. I don't mind it going away as fast as it can go because I've got memories, and, after all, memory IS time.