Infinite Snooze

Forgive me Zod, for I have sinned. I have lived like I have all the time in the universe in infinite supply. I have lived like there will always be tomorrow to begin, another day to start, plenty of time to finish that which I am waiting to begin. I have wasted time, because I believed I had time to waste.

At first I lived as if nothing here mattered except belief, because eternity was a few years away, and I was told my best and lasting contribution to the world would be to convince people to believe what I did about the unknowable. I believed the end of the world was only a few years away, and was out of my control, so what did it matter what I did? And while I knew this was wrong, I felt powerless to oppose the wrongness in philosophy of my friends and family and escape from this worldview. So I chose to play dead.

Since then, I have entertained a number of contradictory notions that I have known not to be true from any philosophical angle. The foremost and most pernicious of these is that I will be granted infinite and special dispensation of time, so I can wait as long as I want to before growing/waking/shaping/perking up and taking the first step on finding the path before me.

This idea is, of course, irrational and unsupportable, but I believe it anyway. It is, in fact, on of my deepest beliefs. It is a spectacular delusion born of my cowardice in the face of the challenges presented by my fellow man and my refusal to admit to my own mortality. And a special and strange delusion it is, that I should not grapple with the world as it is, but take my leisure and wait for a better world to present itself to me, the insane prince of null-time.

It has been a profound disservice to myself to entertain the notion of special dispensation. I frequently blame the people around me for this. I lament that no one asks more of me, while asking very little of myself. While there is a certain rightness to the idea that people need to speak up when I am not meeting their needs, it is transparent bullshit that it is on other people to motivate me or prod me to join the world of the living. Is is, in fact, MY job to find my own purpose and decide what is and isn't wasting time. It is not the job of other people to monitor my time for me. It is not the job of other people to define my motivation for me. It is not the job of other people to remind me that time is always passing, falling and slipping away. My time is the only meaningful currency I am given, it is up to me to guard it from those who would take it without asking, and to spend it well.

I am the only one grasping this part of the elephant. I am the only one who can describe the view from my position. I am the only one who can try to address the cracks in the world no one else can see from way over there in their own heads.

The only thing that matters in the face of my morality is using my time well, in pursuit of what I understand to be important. The sense of panic, denial and shame in the face of mortality all stem from the knowledge that I don't do as much as I know could, that the time I spend is too frequently on activities that I know to be unimportant to me or anyone else. It is the knowledge that my response to my inevitable end and the inevitable obstacles placed between me and my goals has been, since I was young, to do the bare minimum it takes to get by, and then to sit back, and let time slip away, in the hopes that a better universe with more time would present itself. Presented with a mountain to climb, I set up a hammock at the bottom and took a 30-year nap.

If I want to die at peace, that needs to stop.

I don't fear dying with my work incomplete, I fear dying with my work not begun. I fear dying not having tried at all. I fear dying after a lifetime of hitting the snooze button, when I could have just woken up.