Mentalechoes

Tick tock, tick tock, goes the clock.
Time passes, I take part in life classes.
What do I learn; for what do I yearn?
There is plenty to see, but what shall I be?
When the tick tock of the clock,
comes to a stop!

I’m obsessed with time! I’m obsessed with it because when I’m not wasting it, there is never enough to do all the things that I want. I find it so ironically funny that we know exactly how much money we have, but we have no idea how much time we have, yet we are so careless with time, and so careful with our money! Doesn’t that seem so incredibly back to front?

It’s this ‘here now, gone tomorrow’ finality of life that drives to me write this blog to be honest with you. In the dawn of the digital age these blogs, these windows into our own unique minds, will survive into the centuries to come in a form almost indestructable: ones and zeros! Historians of the future will not so much pick up leather bound volumes of vellum and parchment, but instead spider across untold exabytes of stored data in vast computer databases. I often fantasise about my blog being discovered in 500 years by someone who stumbles upon me by chance, in some hidden away corner of an unimaginably big data center. Then to be resurrected and brought back again to the light of day for a new generation. I’m vain that way. I would like to be famous one day as a fabulous writer.

Really, if we can’t take anything with us, then it’s what we leave behind that makes us immortal!

But this discussion all seems so maudlin tonight; thinking about the time after our life has passed. Perhaps it’s the haunting electro tunes that seems to be heightening my own gothic feeling, but it feels very dark and heavy to be talking about this. And yet at the same time, perhaps not. To try to see past our own lifetime lets us appreciate how precious the time is that we have within our lifetime.

When I was seventeen I used to go and see a clairvoyant with my mother as I was fascinated by what my future held. I used to hold crystal balls, and turn tarot cards, and hand over personal objects, all to be read by mystical old ladies who I believed had a power to tell me of myself in the time beyond my mental vision. Later I came to realise that I didn’t want to know what my future was because I came to feel that once someone had told me, then that future would set like instant drying cement and I would only have that path to follow. Perhaps I was looking to see if great things were in store for me; perhaps I was hoping I would become someone great. I don’t really remember anymore. It was a long time ago, and I have travelled a long way from that boy on the beaches of the Gold Coast. Whatever it is I was hoping to see back then in the cards and hear in the readings, I am fairly sure I found them later as I left home and headed out for the world beyond, to terra icognita.

Now though I find myself once again fascinated by the future, and I become intensely curious to know what’s in store. After all, the first part of my life is over, my heady days of youth. Now comes the second phase of life, the days of wisdom born of life experience and the power of a strong mind.

I wonder if this obsession with life and time is the result of the fire yesterday? Maybe! I spent a long time afterwards playing what-if games with myself. I experienced many different endings to the one that I did experience. Some of them better, some of them worse, all of them guiding me to another place away from where I am now.

I wonder if it is possible to know what lies ahead? Because at this time of my life, I think I would like to see what shape the horizon takes.

Padwanna!