I’ve thought about time. It does not surprise me, nor was I able to make any major or new observations. But it does not mean I didn’t think about it. Most thought is routine; you do it like the dishes or cooking the few things you know how to cook well. That is to say: you do it without volition and almost robotically. It would happen even if you weren’t thinking about it, and it would happen precisely as it would if you had your mind set on it. That is how I think about time. It occurs independently, and I don’t have to move a muscle to trigger the thought. I reckon there are topics like this for all people. For me, it is time, its passage, its importance, its monotony and its omnipresence.
I sit on this bus, as I have done many times before. Like the dishes, like writing, like everything else that I do over and over again, it has all melded into one another. There is no particular memory I have of travelling in an overnight bus. I just have a general idea of how it goes and what happened when I was on a bus once, but separating it all and sifting through it is impossible. Time has cast a patina on it all. It’s all safe and protected and forever hidden from even myself. But most of all, like all things with a little burnish on them, it is colourful and vibrant.
I reckon, in the end, it all becomes this: a collection of general ideas. I will never befriend someone new like the first few times, and indeed, I will not fall in love and know about it. It will happen and get melded with the many times I’ve experienced it before. There is nothing new to feel anymore. All the new gets sorted into a label before it even happens, and why does it happen? Time, of course; why else? It is time that blunts the effect of novelty.
Many people would think ill of this idea, and immediately, conditioned as they are to say the right thing, even when no such thing exists, they will retort by saying something that has been rinsed and repeated a million times by all sorts of people. There is always something new that can happen; they might say, not knowing that their mindless regurgitation of the idea defeats their defense on its own.