After many years of this habitual practice of writing down carefully organize and structured thoughts through journaling and prose writing, I see how important the representation of the date and time is on these entries. Maybe not so much the time of the entries, but the years, are something, that for a long time, I would rely upon myself to either know inherently or to research by finding a previous year’s entry marker and follow that for the rest of the ledger. I never considered years, could get lost, vacate, and seemingly melt into one another. I notice it more and more with my photos and how, in my messy self proclaimed organizational methods, they span a vast number of years, and sadly I can distinctly see the work dry up as we get closer to the present day.
Entire years can, and for the vast majority of the population do, go by without any production of anything it feel proud of creating. If an entire year elapses without anything being created, learned, or skill mastered then what really happened in that year? I suppose that’s why most people find purpose in their jobs, ‘On this year of this date I got a raise, I made partner, I grossed the largest number of sales’, all markers of some sort of feeling of accomplishment. This may also very well be why people find so much Joy in having kids. We all have a degree of creative impulse within us, and like all human traits, it’s stronger or weaker between one person and the next, but the act of being able to make another human and mark it’s progress through the years, satisfies that need of a creative impulse and places annual trophies on our shelves for others to see. By the time our child reaches adulthood, we have compiled so much trial and error, lessons, skills, and teachings of wisdom within our children, we have a walking interactive piece of art which we can point to and say, “I did that!”
This may also explain why I have no desire to have kids.
My years are marked with accomplishments and projects which I take upon myself to express and create at will. It is a sort of imposed edict that I must contribute something to this year, for myself. This year must be remembered in some albeit small way, the degree of which is irrelevant, as long as I leave something behind that proves I was here; a way to validate I experienced and partook in the human experience THAT particular year. We are all infected with this illusion that we will go on in this life infinitum, which in turn causes a sort of laziness of the obligation to experience and take special note of our existence from day to day, year to year. The very stalwart truth is that we will all have the entirety of our liquid drained and our bones dissolved into dust eventually, and whatever we leave behind of our accomplishments will be a finite and very solid calculable number. The number of books read or written, the countless skills we did or never took interest to learn are all finite, and we take this for granted. Just like we let the years compile themselves as rooms in this house of life, each year a room we leave empty because we couldn’t slowdown, focus, appreciate, or create enough to decorate it with some sort of accomplishment. We must all in our individual ways find a method in which to commemorate and appreciate our very unique experience, because although our life expectancy has greatly increased, death hasn’t been cured, so make the most of it. Make something. Learn something. Contribute SOMETHING. You have the time, just not as much as you had originally thought.
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