Growing up is a deeply upsetting feeling. Most of my day is spent trying to distract myself from falling into an existential hole as my childhood memories become more and more faded, like old film photos or browning newspapers. There is no way to preserve the past –– that's something I know and something I've come to love –– but it scares me when there's occasionally no way to find the past. Adulthood is an infinite subway ride between excel spreadsheets and laundry, measured by rhythmic substance use and the occasional workout. Time is slowly building peripheral blinders on my vision, like the ones they put on horses to prevent them from getting scared. The thing is I don't want to only see in one direction. I want to look around, not just backwards but across all the imagined possible timelines of all the people I am right now and all the people I could be.
The world we live in doesn't allow for that. If you want to survive, you have to push forward, look forward, think forward –– you have to have some direction. And I think that's fundamentally at odds with what makes us human. But isn't that capitalism? At odds with nature. Life –– and I mean real life, conscious existence, what persists regardless of societal constructs –– isn't measured in metrics of success or promotions or pay. Real life can't really be measured at all. It slips between the cracks of our organized routines, sounds like unconfined laughter and honesty.
One of my favorite feelings in the world is the sensation I get after sprinting. When your throat is dry and you taste blood, and you can feel your heartbeat in your neck. I never feel more alive than when I have the wind knocked out of me –– not in the gym, but outside. That feeling grounds me, reconnects me to my body, reminds me what I am and shrugs off all the strings with which we tether ourselves to faux life. I live for those moments, tucked between hours of being a marionette of shoulds and coulds, responsibility and order.
It makes me sad to know how much we all lack those moments of realness. How many people move through space and time without ever wondering if it's what they want, or questioning why things are the way they are. We are so impressionable, so adaptable, we so often accept the conditions we are handed without question. The grind, the routines, the five year plans and career paths don't leave us time to imagine new ways of being. And make no mistake, it's not a coincidence. We are exploited in our oblivious ignorance.
Once, I sat with my feet dangling out a second story window above a busy street. I was there for hours watching people window shop and walk. No one bothered to look up. No one knew I was there, except for one little boy who must have been four or five. He was wearing deep blue rain boots and an olive green rain coat, looking up at me in shock and awe while his mother guided him down the street. She never stopped to see what he was seeing, and him and I just stared at each other from twenty feet apart.
That moment has stuck with me for the last six years since it happened. I like to climb roofs, and trees, and be perched in general. Every time I do this in a public space, only kids see me. I've always felt like there's something profound about that. Only children have the time and "lack" of preconceived societal "rightness" to truly see the world for what it is. The older we get, the more we hold on to ideas we've made up about how things are. The less we see because the more we've seen.
In my next year of life I hope to reclaim some of that childish insight. I want to see the world again as it is, not as a mess of borders and rules. I find so much joy in the small moments where I am transported back to my childhood; eating strawberry shortcake or getting hit by sprinkler water. I believe random acts of unpredictability are a form of time travel, bringing us back to our pasts and repainting them in hues from the present. And perhaps, if we chase them, the past will begin to recolor the present as well.