Once, I Wanted to Be The Greatest

Earlier this afternoon, a number of my colleagues and myself were entrenched in one of our office's conference rooms, a few others vocally present on the telephone, engaged in a marathon discussion, escalating to levels of herculean absurdity at points, and, ultimately, rather cyclic in both nature and outcome. At one point, in reviewing a funnel-shaped visual designed to purportedly illustrate a systematic and sensical approach to strategy, it was proposed to add the inverse to the diagram, create an hourglass. This hourglass imagery, layered freshly and emphatically in my mind, atop of internal meditations on recent conversations with the filmmaker concerning issues of hauntology and techno-futurism, has induced a constant flood of thought the past few hours on a simple, crucial, inherent, and awesomely elusive element to our own organic physicality, to our and surrounding entities' being: time.

The past few weeks have been oddly surreal, and as I try to recall or project the foundation of this sentiment, to slow my movements and reflect, I realize it has been extending from a subconscious sense of moving forward with an accelerated inertia, as of late. I am moving forward with a velocity that I cannot control, and one that is, proportionately, not what I am accustomed to. I am moving too fast. I am absorbing too little. My days have become distorted, images shrunk and stretched short in a convex lens. Trying to mentally account for minutes in my day, even hours in my day, seems as vain and as futile as gathering all the grains of sand of a long beach into a single pail.

When I was a very young girl, I wanted to become a mermaid; as I continued to grow and learn, my aspirations morphed and transposed to tangibly, credibly idealistic goals. Truck driver, then the prerequisite teacher, then something indeterminate with writing. Writing song lyrics, writing poems, writing novels, writing magazine articles. Somewhere during the traverses across geographic and temporal planes, I deemed these other dreams just as mythical, just as fantastic as my beautifully naive and idle thoughts of escaping as a creature of the sea. Now, I wake up in an unfamiliar town, still, two years later, to discern, dissect, synthesize, augment, actualize intangible packages of messages, frequently both laughing and crying at myself.

Torschlusspanik.

A syllabically, phonetically long German word, which is impossible to elegantly and sufficiently translate into English; a direct denotation is gate-closing panic, however, a more appropriate and essential description is the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.

(image taken from Sue du Jour)