Before the fear of time, of the inevitable life that wears away and vanishes; before death that waits for us to grow old and holds among our reserved fears the illusion of grandchildren, retirement, and morning coffee taken with weariness, death existed in other disguises. Time was not a subject of thought; death lurked in the trenches, in the mines, and in a more ungrateful world. They ate herbs and drank water from a well, and those men and women did not think about becoming grandparents as they grew up. They dreamed of surviving the winter with the next day's meal, and I imagine that the calendar meant nothing to them.
Now we have more calendar pages, schedules, television, and toothpaste, and we are exhausted—exhausted from thinking that we have so much time. We make thirty-year plans and pay mortgages that break our souls. Among so many windows, time became fear; it overwhelms us to think that one day we will die when life today lasts a hundred lifetimes of yesterday. They did not have that heaviness; they did not think they would die someday nor that they had to make the most of this life. They knew they were ephemeral, forgotten, a conduit toward another era that would be more enduring, bringing with it a hope they did not understand. Thinking more deeply about that space and its trivialities, I very much doubt that the word "hope" existed in their languages at that time.
But we are ungrateful and foolish. It corrodes our soul to be left without the time we are losing. We care greatly about being informed; our pupils dilate with the illusion of knowing everything, as if our task were to be an oracle that sees and feels all. We weep for Gaza and defend others' causes, but we have no causes of our own. We stopped owning our reality and moved into a web, a collective, an intricate path. We ceased to be the nomads who marveled at the stars and moons disguised as shadows, we stopped looking at the sky—when we began to fear time.
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