Time marches on regardless.
A student goes to his teacher and voices that he wants to learn new languages but can’t see himself committing to it for a long time. The teacher simply replies, “time marches on regardless.”
Time passing by is inescapable, like the ceaseless flow of a river. We’ve all spent a lot of it looking back, no doubt, deliberating over long-gone periods that made us feel amazing or full of regret. During your life, the current of days, weeks, months, and years will pull you along in its embrace, and you’ll have two choices: Commit to its rippling cadence, known as life’s rhythms, or idly float, letting the stream carry you in whichever way as the banks you could have stopped at blur past.
if you dive mindfully into life, you can better embrace each opportunity. You’ll fill yourself with cultivated skills, knowledge, ideas and relationships — pouring passion into their chosen paths. Each time of practice will immerse you further you and fortifies your ideas of what you want — rather than impede it.
On the other hand, you may sit and treat your “ambivalence and worry as a form of religion.” But as Polly says,
Isn’t that the real point of being alive? I thought. Not to analyze and overthink everything, but to allow yourself to be utterly consumed by the divine!
A renowned painter doesn’t simply watch the days go by; they allow each one to saturate with colour and artistic expression, blending them into memorable scenes for their chosen canvas. A talented songwriter doesn’t let life’s beat escape unheard; each pocket of inspiration or crescendo of an experience will move into existence in a new song. And annual cycles may mean nothing to the experienced coder who spends each waking hour exploring technology’s frontiers to keep bringing deeper imaginations and reality together.
I’d say you are like-minded if you’re reading this. You grok the fact that time will always continue its march, like how Earth’s tides always drift unperterbed, whether we choose to swim in it or not.
The choice of who you become always lies in you: take up life’s opportunities and leave your indelible mark on the world, or let the days slip by, unnoticed and unfulfilled — until you look back on it wishing you’d done what you said you wanted. Either way, like in the earlier story, you’ll still reach the same age. But either you have what you wanted or you don’t.
I use ocean analogies because I feel we live life in continuous waves. Highs and lows followed by just that. Similar to how we train and work: sprints and rest, followed by more sprints and rest. Therefore, it’s easy to get in the mindframe to believe that now is either the best it’ll ever be, or that everything is doomed.
You have powers and energy that will be lost in time if you do nothing about it. You can think of all the ways you want to impact the world, but if you do nothing about it, what good is that? I tell myself this often as a reminder to let my future be better as a result of my choices. Whether that’s to the future society I’m in, my family, or just me.
If you’re ever stuck wondering whether you should do what you’ve wanted to achieve for a long time, ask yourself: where will you be in a few years if you don’t do it?