The Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with duality in everything. The difference between Night and Day, Male and Female, Fertility and the Desert....they saw everything in pairs. The well known Asian symbol of Taijitu (or more commonly known as Yin and Yang) below is a defining image of duality. (I've put in two pictures because the second one in fractal art is just cool)
It depicts the duality between good and evil. While at the same time, it also shows that nothing is entirely good and at the same time nothing is entirely evil either. The two spots are not their for aesthetic purposes, they define the belief that in every evil there is a bit of good and vice versa. It also shows that they are both part of the same united whole. This similarity in beliefs even though these two ideas existed thousands of miles apart and in different ages in time is quite astonishing. There are many theories that claim to prove the reasons for a lot of similarities between civilizations across the world and their beliefs and although, I am personally inclined to believe in one of them and can write pages and pages about it, it is not what I want to write about.
I never really saw duality as that much of a part of everyday life, like yes, we do have night and day and the obvious dualities like that. But, it still seemed like something that wasn't that important. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about a lot of random things and I realized that there is one more thing that exhibits extreme duality. You don't even realize it until you think about it but it has just two speeds, lightning and sloth. I'm talking about time. It can seem to be both flying and crawling all at once, depending on how you look at it.
Right now, as I'm waiting for spring break, it seems to crawl, my plane is in a few hours and I just can't wait. At the same time, I think of my friends, especially those back in India. Some of you are graduating from college in a couple of months and it seems like just yesterday that we were standing outside Springdales School waiting to give our Class 12 Board exams. How time seems to have flown.
This is what has startled me. Time's duality is so subtle and at the same time its so extreme. Sitting in an exam it seems like Time is going by like lightning and you wish you could have more. If you were spending the same two hours in a boring lecture then it seems to drag on forever (like the movement of a sloth). Hence the title of this blog entry. Time only does have two speeds, lightning and sloth. Sometimes these speeds exist at once, and it just depends on how you look at things. Suppose, you really don't want to be someplace right now, say a class, it always seems to stretch on forever. At the same time, suppose you were conversing with good friends, you can go on until the wee hours of the night without batting an eyelid. Judging by this I feel the rate it which time flies is proportional to the amount of enjoyment we get from whatever it is we are doing right now. So the more you enjoy something, the faster time seems to go.
If you look long term, when something really keeps you occupied, you don't notice time go by at all. College has kept me super busy, just like it probably has for whoever is reading this. It scares me to think that I've been so busy that I barely even realize that I'm well into the latter half of my third year of college. Why it seems like yesterday that I even got here, filled with awe at being at a new place. This scares me even more because at this rate, in no time we'll all be out of college and entering the work world. While that would be an adventure by itself, you'll look back at this time in college and feel like you never even noticed the four or so years go by.
So now I come to the main point of this blog entry. We are all so concerned with time (or the lack of it) and we are all so concerned with worrying about the future and facing our pasts. I say, enjoy the time that you have right now, you're never going to have it again. I have a couple of months or less left of being a teenager, and I will never be one again. Do I look back and feel like I've done everything I wanted to do as a teenager, the answer is no sometimes because there are times when I feel or I wish I could have done something when I had the chance. Well I think its better to live life by appreciating and enjoying the present moment. I'm sitting in North Campus on an uncomfortable chair, waiting for a teammate to send a project in. And all this a few hours before I need to leave for my spring break. Despite all this, I'm still feeling happy, I feel like life is going along well. I'm excited about going to London for break, I'm chatting on MSN with a good friend and that makes me feel great.
I feel that when we appreciate what we have in the present moment, instead of getting worried about what has happened in the past or what is yet to happen, I think we'll all lead much happier lives while feeling like we are heeding the advice of a very famous and very old man named Gandalf. That "All we have to do, is to decide what to do, in the time that is given to us", the time that we are in right now.
