It's About Time

Adam Espinola 

          continued ...

          Blades of grass that sport sweetened dew, retrieve and refract spears of moonlight, blurring and mixing the earth with the color of true spring. The offspring of a perfect marriage between swamped ground and a midnight sky. An autumn wind sweeping away a rotted leaf across the raw, bare road giving it the animation of a tiny critter skittering along the asphalt. Notice how, within your own imagination, time seems to have slowed? Maybe you found yourself lost in your envisioning?  Your mood has changed? Perhaps finding peace where it may not be apparent can have a profound effect on the mind. In each stand-still of time there is some degree of lost potential. A potential spark of an idea or inspiration can wedge itself inside the most unconventional portion of the bigger picture. Nothing is ever static, just like time.

          Of course, I’m just talking out my hat. I’m a 19-year old computer science student and I know nothing of how time really relates to the brain or psyche. This is just a belief I’ve developed over some time through curiosity and experiences I’ve had. In some earlier periods of my life, although, it wasn’t a belief but more of an obsession. The past became something that I wanted to desperately hold on to, but my memories of the past always ended up hazy. So, I made up a little mechanic in my mind that I dubbed “skipping”, in which take a snapshot of my present whereabouts and make an extra special mental note of it and store it in the back of my mind. I’ll later review this snapshot down the line and see if the memory is still clear due to the special effort I made. I called it skipping because I wanted the time between a snapshot’s conception and its review to rush by, making the mental note easier to re-experience. My longest skip started when I was a freshman in high school sitting in my Spanish-1B class, desperately yearning for it to go by. I made a mental image of the moment and wanted to think of that instance in time as I graduate from high school four years later, just to validate the idea. To prove to myself that my perception of time can be somewhat distorted. It didn’t prove anything though; the years still flew by but when the time came I didn’t care about what happened in the past. It was, on the other hand, interesting to see how far I’ve come, where I was presently, and where I wanted to be. I’ve learned that I don’t want my time to rush by and that it should be savored but not dwelled on. I believe that’s a good point to sum up this belief.

          Mind over matter. Each passing sliver of time runs in and out of perception, what is made from them is up to their consuming mind. The human mind is powerful, so much so that even the fabric of time can almost ever-so-slightly bend to its will.