Time.

Every heartbeat is another from the last. Every breath is alive and unique, like you, but just one more of the hundreds every hour — think of everyone breathing, every heart beating, every thought that passes each and every second through the world.

Wherever you are, standing or sitting, just feel it: time. Time passing. Time flowing. Time flowing over you and around you, around everyone. Stopping for nothing. Leaving dead things buried and the uncertain yet to come. Regrets and losses — irretrievable in its sudden depths. Fears and doubts unknowable as we fight against the current that pushes everything behind us in a moment, no foothold, no vision.

Time leaves us with only one thing: the present. This is all we can hope to know. This is all we can hope to have.

Sometimes we live as if we know the future. And then sometimes we live as if we’re in the past. But we are none of these things. We’re in the present. The past is swept away. We are who are right now. We are not who we were or who we will be. We can only do things now, never in the future. We live now.

So feel time’s cold waters, and try not to move through them. Let time flow, because that is what it will do. Flow with it. Live for the present tense and the feeling of life and the trillionths of each second as they pass irretrievably into the unchangeable.

The Beauty of a Flower

We sigh as the morning fades, the sun making its slow climb by the well-worn route to its Zenith. You say you could reach it.

The land a mist, a heavy dead weight, a veil. The trees like sudden black peaks that punch through, knives. You say we could run through it all, and be free.

We cry as I say no, it can never be. The air is a vice of coldness. It enters my lungs like a cloud of a million such frozen shards.

My body has lost any desire to be warm. Instead the heart just beats it weak rhythm to the joke of it all. You show me the path, but all I see is faces in dark towers lining it.

You say you could take me and run, run, run, run with the wind and the river and the rain and dark tor pouring past.

And my heart rattles, an insincerity, a laughter within my very chest. It is a ghost. It says no, no, no, it can never be.

What else is there?

What really is there to our lives? What constructs us, forms us, makes us who we are? How are we defined? Are we defined through what we do, or what we feel? How others see us, or how we see ourselves? Do the things we have and the lives we lead, our aspirations and our achievements, really give us meaning? Or is this just another layer away from our true humanity?

Our lives are spent trying to find meaning. We battle with the constantly brushed-aside fear that there is no such meaning to be found. We carry on, leaving that question unanswered, but with it nagging at us whenever we lapse into reflection.

We try and create meaning. But what is more meaningful than the sheer fact of being alive?

We fear there is no meaning. We look around the blank space of our empty lives and find no answer to the question that hangs on to us — always judging ourselves against it, always finding nothing more than dissatisfaction with what is and turning what will be into some false ideal.

Our response is always to fill that blank space, to block out that emptiness. Clogging it up with clutter and worthless items; building walls so we can’t see out, piles and piles of stuff so that the heavens are nothing more than light pollution and the stars — are they stars, or the lights of planes overhead?

This is the answer we want to see: that there is more to being alive than the fact of it. And so life passes us by like the daytime — the sun rises and the sun sets on this helpless wresting and we find nothing.

All these things we have created are but fleeting. These walls? These windows? The bricks and stone and plastic and glass and metal? Everything is a cycle. Everything breaks down and dissolves. But in nature things grow back.

We see people die, and we see ourselves rapidly approaching the same empty fate — too quickly, too short a time to make anything of it. We abhor our nature. We pretend we are more than we were made to be. We rebel against our bonds, but this is their strength. And yet we cannot see beyond the walls we have made, which lock us in. The space we have filled has become nothing more than a façade. Plastic and fake; landfill.

And so we seem fated to breathe an unsatisfied last. All that we attempted to create, to fashion from the emptiness — lost and forgotten, blown away by the breath of time, which recognises no meaning.

To fill an empty space is to lose its very definition. Maybe our lives are empty and have no meaning. But we are alive. And that is all that we need to be. Clear away the fantasies and expectations, the clutter, the detritus of our years on this planet, and see what’s really there. Look around and look through. Feel yourself, feel everything. Hear everything.

Nothingness.

It is the essence of beauty. And it is terrifying. But it is real. Feel your heart beat to the rhythm of it. Feel your soul breathe in the endlessness, a liberation.

Your mind fills the space it is given. In the spareness of your life, find yourself. Give your mind some room. And be happy.