Off (, I'm)

I remember when I was much younger, time moved so much more slowly. I remember my hair being short when I was three or four years old. I wanted it to be long so badly; I leaned my head back and swung my hair back and forth on my neck, imagining what it would be like when it was long. I could feel it growing, and new that it would be so long before I could tell the difference, that it had grown. I knew that one day I would just look in the mirror and realize, "oh good, my hair's long now!" I could hardly fathom the time it would take until it grew- if I was living in this time, this minute, which took 60 seconds to be over with, how would I possibly make it all those months?

I remember, too, thinking about holidays. Christmas is six months away. The day after my birthday, my birthday was a whole year away. A week was a long time to wait, as was fifteen minutes, or even ten.

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I have been in India for more than two months. Tomorrow I leave for Mussoorie, a hill station about six hours away from Delhi by train. I'm going by myself, and will be staying there in a guest house, taking Hindi classes, working on my independent study project, being ALONE.

I'm not going to lie- I'm terrified.

Sometimes the world looks all grey; I know this color. Too much time, not enough to find "happy", too much to do and nothing to do but drown in emptiness. I've seen it before, been here before. Which is funny, because I haven't ever been here before. All this is new.

Interspersed in the gray though, colors fade in, and then out again. I realize that this is happening, this is where I am and I can see a shadow of where I will be, and that worrying most likely won't change that. Like, 98% sure. The other thing, though, is that it's not all bad. When the colors fade in, I catch my breath, feel anticipation, excitement, gratitude, press against me like the blast of one of those fireworks that only makes a little spark but is so loud that you lose your breath and feel air and sound press in on your eardrums.

I heard somewhere that 98% of the things we worry about won't happen. How incredible is that? How much energy, then, do I put into anxiety over something that won't happen? And in this case, why should I put energy into worrying about being lonely, overwhelmed, sad, homesick, when I am literally the only person with any control over how I feel?

I think it's going to be good, great. Living in India for a month with nothing to do but take photos, write, hike, walk around, um, what's the problem? Taklif kya hai?!?

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I wonder if the reason that time moves more slowly for children is because they are infinitely better at being in the moment. They don't think ahead so much, don't have to plan for work, deal with money, work on homework, be in charge. Maybe they've got a head-start on us grown-ups (did I just call myself a grown-up?), but I don't think it's just that. I think they've got a wisdom that we've lost somewhere along the way. One that we can recall, regain, reclaim, remember. If we work at it, do it consciously, mindfully.

I learned something in math class once. Maybe it was biology, but anyway, here it is; If we measure, for example, a coastline, we'll get an approximate distance. We can look at a sattelelite image, assume that one inch is equivalent to one mile, and go from there. If we go out with a car and drive the length of the coast, tracking the distance, we'll probably get a different measurement. Maybe slightly longer. If we go out to the coast, assuming we somehow identify the exact coastline, and measure that line with a ruler, we'll probably get an even larger distance. We can keep going with this too. With smaller and smaller units of measurement, we'll get longer and longer distances. And there's no bottom line to the size of our measuring stick, so there's no upper limit to the length of that coast line- it is infinitely long. It really is.

Maybe we can look at time the same way. It is what we make of it, certainly, but it is also as long as we make it. It can be very short, fast, scream by, when we're having fun. Or it can go excruciatingly slowly if we're bored or upset or impatient. The length of time has less to do with the number of seconds and more to do with the way we live them. So what if we could make every minute what we want it to be, the length we want it to be, the color and texture we want it to be? I think we can. But we have to take responsibility for ourselves, our time, first. That's hard.

In yoga, there's a kind of breathing that sounds like the sea. You can make your inhales and exhales as long or as short as you want. It cleanses your blood by draining out all the old and drawing in all new with the new breath, empties out your mind of everything but the slow sea.

Inhale
1.2.3.4.5.

Exhale
1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.