I had meant to write up a blog post for my birthday, about the things I’ve learned about the world in the 37 years I’ve been alive. But that was, oh, six months ago now; today is my half birthday. (In fact, it’s been so long, that I’ve had to update that sentence and the date of this post like, five times.)
The farther away from my birthday it gets, the more foolish I feel writing up something about it. And of course, the more foolish I feel, the less likely I am to actually write something at all. Shame is as insurmountable an obstacle as inertia.
And yet, it would be a waste to let this opportunity go by without remarking on it. And I’ve wasted far too many opportunities to let one more pass without reflection. So, I think this particular opportunity has a couple of interesting facets to explore.
Time and the marking of such
It has been a constant refrain throughout my life that I am indifferent towards, if not outright disdainful of, holidays, birthdays, and other markers which celebrate the passage of time. Why this is, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve been saying I felt like I was 75 years old since I was 10 or 11, so perhaps there is some part of my psyche that feels unmoored from time in some way that makes the passing of it seem trivial. Perhaps digging deeper, there’s some unpleasant memories and feelings regarding holidays that makes them unpalatable, and so like many of the other negative or uncomfortable parts of my self, I suppress or ignore them in the hopes that they can cause no more discomfort. But that’s a topic of discussion for my therapist.
During the last two (and now nearly three) years of unending and Pandemic Time, this feeling of being unmoored from time has been allowed, and in fact encouraged to, proliferate through every corner of my life. Every day feels the same as the last. If it weren’t for the changing of the seasons outside, I think the only distinction between any one moment and the next was whether it was a work day or not. And as a salaried employee working for a company spanning the world’s timezones, even that distinction is quite fuzzy.
Time swirls and flows and drips and crawls and sprints past me and I largely remain unobservant to its passing. And if I had an infinite amount of time, perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But alas, as far as I know, I am not immortal and so intellectually I recognize there is an ever-dwindling pool of moments flitting past me. At some point in the future the last one will pass me by and take me unawares and I won’t have anything to say for it.
But even if I were immortal, even if I had an infinite amount of time for myself, the time I have with those I love and care about is limited. There are a finite number of moments I have with them. And thus if that’s the case, each of those moments is precious and irreplaceable. And too many have been allowed to disappear. But that can change.
And this leads me to the next facet.
Overcoming inertial fallacies
There’s a concept called the Sunk Cost fallacy, and it works like this: you have already spent X amount of time/money/effort/resources on some endeavor, and even though it has not yet yielded results, and in fact, if you looked at it with impartial and unbiased eyes you have no reason to think it possibly would, and yet, because of the prior investment, the cost, you still keep going because It Just Has To work at some point, because look at all this cost? How could all this cost be for nothing? There are elements of pride and ego involved in this, of course. Because you are not the kind of person who would invest so much in something so specious, so therefore you keep going, otherwise you admit defeat. You admit you were wrong. And that’s a particularly difficult bit of inertia to overcome.
But there’s an… inverse? corollary? of this fallacy that is just as pernicious and difficult to overcome. That is, you have spent so long not doing a thing, not starting a thing, that to start now so late in the game seems foolish. You’re so far behind and you have such a long way to go that you might as well not start. And so you don’t. You missed your chance to get in the ground floor, so now it’s not worth it. You’re not as far or as accomplished as you would have been had you started when you should have, so now you won’t. And damnit if that isn’t paralyzing. If the Sunk Cost fallacy is overcoming the inertia of a moving body, then this fallacy (which I’ll call the Too Late fallacy for lack of knowing the proper term, or even if there is a proper term) is overcoming the inertia of a body at rest.
But, there’re a couple of questions that can help overcome that fallacy. First, too late for what? Who are you in a race against? Unless you’re talking about an actual physical race with a starting gun and other racers, then who cares? Also, even if you are talking about an actual race, there’re races every day somewhere. You can always find another one. The important part is The Running of the Race, not when or where or it happens. And second, if you started today, right now, would you be farther along than if you started tomorrow? And the obvious answer to that is yes. The best time to start is yesterday, but presuming you didn’t start yesterday, the next best time to start is today. Right now.
Synthesizing the summary (or whatever)
So, if time is a finite resource and worthy of being marked and observed and it’s never too late to start doing so, what choice do I have but to start trying to mark the time? To embrace the passage of time and celebrate the moments? So here’s me trying to do that.
This website was intended to be a place for me to put myself out there into the world that wasn’t social media. Someplace where I had control. And I’ve let it sit fallow and unused. But that’s ok. Those are moments in the past that I let go by and I can’t get them back. But I can start today. I can start now.
Last year I only updated this site a total of four times. Let’s see if this year I can beat that. Happy new year, everyone.
