Long Days Can’t Be That Long

I had a long day filled with nothings, and when it was finally time to go to bed, I thought to myself, I’m impressed with my ability to simply watch a day go by. But what else was supposed to happen?

I think then, for the first time, I felt reassured by the inflexibility of time.

A year will always pass in a year’s time. A day, good or bad, can only ever be 24 hours long. Before, thoughts like this filled me with dismay. I’ve always been way too attached to the past, and thus despair easily at its passage. Looking forward, though, I now see something merciful in the idea of the inevitable.

And though the past is fixed as it is, the future holds onto the potential for hope. No matter what, in ten years, ten years will have passed, I will be ten years older than I am right now, and I will have done ten years’ worth of stuff. But I still get to define, somewhat, what that is.

I’ve been glancing back for far too long. I can now see glimpses of something else, sustained by the thought that a day will pass as a day will pass, and it will always take me with it. You can’t ever be anywhere except exactly where— and when— you are.

So, yes, I’m impressed with my ability to simply watch a day go by. I’m relieved at the idea that I am not as responsible for the present as I once thought I was. And I’m glad that looking back, looking forward, or simply watching a day go by, aren’t all that different after all. At the end of a second, a second ends, and that’s that.

Profoundly prosaic, or so I think.

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PS: Perhaps it always takes a poet decades to understand the concept of the present. Perhaps, I don’t understand it at all.