How to Trick Time (Before It Tricks You)
One summer, when I was about ten years old, there was a moment in time that I haven’t forgotten. It wasn’t an exciting moment, more of an everyday moment.
I was at the beach, carefully stepping on hot rocks with flip flops after swimming at a low tide where there was a sandbar. Focussed on where I was stepping, it occurred to me that, “this moment is going to end up far in the past, like every other moment”.
Playing a little game I thought, what if I could keep this moment alive in my memory for the rest of my life, by reliving it in my mind every single day? Kind of like a mental time capsule that I would carry with me into the future. A thread that would always connect me to that point in time.
As a ten-year-old, I felt the future as a vast unknown that far outweighed my short life so far. I wondered, how can something that is so real, so “now” end up so far in the past, and how far in the past will that be? I was thinking maybe I would watch the time go, like seeing the sun slowly dip below the horizon.
I still remember what it was like to be in the mind of my ten-year-old self at that moment, stepping on beach stones. I guess my experiment worked, maybe even better than a photo.
Even though I look different on the outside now, who I was inside as that ten-year-old is the same person I am now as a fifty-five-year-old and who I will be as an older woman. I may think differently now and have way more life experience, but I still feel like that was me in that ten-year-old body. We are connected by an invisible thread of memory to our past selves, and the moment we’re in now is connected by an invisible thread to the future.
As a teen, I did a drawing of a very old woman I found in a magazine, which I thought would be fun to do. Her eyes peered out of a face mapped with deep wrinkles, formed by a past rich with experience. In the background, I drew a smaller portrait of a young girl, like a faded ghost. I imagined that these were the same person at different points in time. I think it boggled my mind that this weathered old woman could have once been a young girl.
Time is the most consistent, most sure thing in our lives (like taxes, as the saying goes). I can watch time, feel like I’ve gained or lost time, but I can’t change time. However, I can pay attention, like my ten-year-old self did, on the beach that afternoon. I can work with time, making my memories richer by being as aware and alive as I can be. I can say to time, “hey, I know what you’re up to”, just so I can try not to let it catch me unaware.
Image above: Westcoast Trail, 2024
Image below: “Drawing of an Old Lady”, circa 1986
