Time is a weird thing to think about because it’s relative and can feel like an arbitrary thing. A day is a series of hours that, when put together, has a name, and we have names for each day and seven of them gives us a week. If I experienced the same amount of hours but didn’t think of it as a day, it would problem seem different somehow.
Birth is something that happens very fast, not the gestation process, that takes nine months, nor the labor, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. But the moment of birth is what I'm talking about, the actual act of being born and emerging into this world is fast. A single push and then you exist where before you didn’t. Death happens the same way. It’s a moment. One second you’re alive, the next you’re not. And, sometimes, everything leading up to that moment can happen very fast. Heart attack, stroke, car accident, you can list all the causes of death, some are very bizarre too like how people die in their sleep. It doesn’t take long to die. Most deaths take years in the sense that they’re caused by an illness or disease, but the actual dying part, the moment of death itself also happens fast.
Change is the more confusing one because we lie to ourselves about how long it took. Waking up and deciding to leave a lover or a job might seem like a decision made in a day, but if I’m being honest, I’ve probably been thinking about it for weeks and just finally admitted it to myself today. Or maybe not, I may never know. My friend told me he quit drinking because of one hangover. He had one hangover and never drank again. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe he’s just misremembering. It seems unlikely, but some people stop addictions with one decision.
Falling in love is also the same way. Some people say you can fall in love in a day. Perhaps they’re confusing love with lust or infatuation. Perhaps love doesn’t take as long as we say it does. Regardless, it happens enough to have given us the cliché of love at first sight.
I guess the trouble with that thinking is that it makes every day look so important that you become too careful to live it fully. Every day I’m supposed to be prepared for my life to change in some fundamental way, thinking of it that was makes it a tiring way to live. We know that most days, nothing happens. But remember, it only takes one for everything to change.
