Tiempo - Part of a thread of thought from Fearless

In the Shawshank Redemption, Steven King wrote an interesting line; “get busy living, or get busy dying.” King plagiarizes Bob Dylan perhaps, but either way, it is a quote worth thinking about while you stand in line waiting to check out at the local grocery store. How does time haunt or hunt all of us?

Back in 1986 I had a horrible nightmare. Mostly asleep in the predawn hours, blissfully listening to the waves of the early morning Pacific tide crash heavily into the shore along the coast of Puerto Vallarta, it grabbed me and pulled me in. Like most nightmares, it started as unthreatening and ridiculous in its inexplicable need to show me the mundane. In the dream, I see myself as I was right before I walked out the door for my vacation, setting my wristwatch on top of the chest-of-drawers in my bedroom, promising myself I would be back to retrieve it. In the dream, I tentatively release the watch to the walnut veneered surface and am violently sucked into the vortex that becomes nightmare. Suddenly watches and clocks, old, and new start swirling around me as they become the eyes of my persecutors. These demon judges churn around me and accuse me of wasting time and more importantly my life. 


Still further I am sucked down into the vortex. They come at me faster, hurtling further charges of slothfulness and uselessness of life and time. They issue a relentless death verdict for my waste of these two fleeting treasures. My judges detach their hands from their faces and hurl them at me like spears. No escape is coming, I know in my dream I am going to be killed by these monsters; I just have not experienced my last life-grasping breaths yet, but they are rapidly coming.

Tangled in a noose of blankets, I struggle to pull myself from the sheets and the bed that is trying to kill me as well. I rip the clock on the nightstand from the wall, toppling the lamp onto the bed, and ejecting the drawers to the floor. I feel vindicated by at least stopping one of the monsters from being able to get at me.

Moments later, reality takes hold; I am awake and have behaved like a lunatic. I scuttle to the patio, scrutinizing the shadows and look at the predawn light coming over the mountains shaking from the terror that still clings to my soul. I can still feel the vice-like grip of deaths hand on my heart, and realize I am blessed to be alive. I stand on the patio until the sun is fully on me, and I can hear the staff and other guests waking. Even then, just to be safe, I wait for the light to creep into the corners and vacate any time devices that may be hiding in wait to cast their hands of death at me.

As safety and sanity regain a foothold on my life, I walk out onto the beach, and breathe the warm, humid salt air. The waves smashing into the shore, and the sand between my toes all work to massage my spirit and help me relax and reconnect with reality. But it is reality that is still pulling at me. The reality that I knew an hour ago, I realize is no longer with me. Instead a new reality has replaced it. My new reality is that life is quite different. I am exhilarated by the time that is slipping away from me and what I will do with what is left of it.

My new clarity is that time does not exist and that only action is representative of life. The reason I do not like to sleep more than what is needed for good health, is that death gets a little taste of me every time I drift off and somewhere deep inside me I know I am being eaten alive as we sleep. The more we sleep the less we live. We are taught that sleep is good and it helps to extend life. This is false. Extending our lives is not the point; it is not the perception of length of life that has value, only that we live passionately why we are here. We must be voracious eaters of life for time to have no judgement of us.