Fast and slow, life has a way of following a strange ebb and flow that moves without our knowing. When things slow down, life can almost become unbearable. You feel stuck, your skin itchy, looking for a way out. When life speeds up, you lose sight of everything, you’re swept along at a frantic pace, and before you know it, you’ve blown through all your energy and reserves and crash. I think I’m close to a crash. Life has moved quite quickly recently and all the light posts are a blur. I can see the horizon far off in the distance, but my surroundings have lost their form, a mix of colours and experiences that meld into one, nothing in focus or really standing out.
Somehow when life becomes this way, you catch yourself filling the moments with empty motions, idle things to fill up all the spaces until you feel pressed wall to wall. Your head full of a million things which all seen so important that you dare not stop. A mountain of emptiness that we allow to weigh us down. If you stop, even for a few seconds, you'd realize there's nothing there. A thousand promises and obligations that would just as easily blow through your open hands. But we don't allow ourselves that silence. We don't allow ourselves that vulnerability.
I'm becoming more and more aware that this collision course is a self fulfilling prophecy. A date that we'd all rather avoid and yet spend our every waking moment working towards. What lies at the end of this road? What is the natural progression? Some cataclysmic accident or implosion that allows us to break apart spectacularly for all to see? Or a slow, silent, unseen wasting away that robs us of pity and condolences. Only a few laboured sighs to mark our passing.
I'm oddly reminded of the Dylan Thomas poem and that ever so powerful message to his father. And yet I cannot muster the strength to rage against that dying light. Perhaps I'm not worthy of such a noble end. Slow down. Life is already rushing towards its end.