I’m tired of taking photos of places that I visit in the hope of sharing it with others in abstract. It never completes the moment. Worse still, I never feel fulfilled in having shared it, because after the click of the shutter, I’m still standing there alone with the camera.
Business trips used to have a specific appeal for me in the past. It provided some sort of affirmation about my significance. Someone was willing to pay for my indulgence because they valued what I had to offer. That’s how it felt before. Now it feels like a chore. An obligation that needs to be fulfilled, and despite the apparent prestige of the function I fulfill at times, it doesn’t provide the comfort that I need nor does it fill the void of purpose in my life.
It scares me when I see young people dedicating their lives to academic and professional pursuits with little or no focus on wholesome endeavours. They’re so excited about carving their niche into a world that will never fully accept them, and will only ever affirm them as long as they have something to contribute. Once they’ve passed their shelf life, they’ll be put out to pasture like everyone else in this consumption-based world, and if they haven’t secured a truly meaningful relationship by that time, it will erase the successes they enjoyed and the true meaning of ‘ephemeral’ will finally be revealed to them.
Recently I’ve been obsessed with the realisation of how short life is when I reflect on the lives I’ve already lived. The future that awaits seems too short to achieve what I had hoped to achieve in life while the purpose of life is changing hues almost constantly these days. The swaying pendulum is catching up with me, and I sometimes feel as if it will not carry me in its swing but instead it will cut me off at the knees providing final confirmation that time was never on my side to begin with.
Time sniggers at me. It was never a welcoming friend, but rather a saluting foe. It always pretended to be giving me more all the time, but instead it has been taking away from my treasures. But because it seemed like an inexhaustible supply, I assumed its source was other than my own vault. I was deluded. It was feeding me from my own resources, and upon each indulgence it was my own store that was being depleted even though I assumed that that was the intended use of this scarce commodity.
I now think of years as hours, if not minutes. What used to seem like a long 365 days is now simply a changing of the seasons without respite. The ground hogs are laughing while we’re distracting ourselves with our self-importance. Life is slipping away while I look on helplessly.