There Is Never Enough Time. And Time Is Always Passing.
On the 2am reaches, the camera that never stops, and what it means to do enough with the time you have.
I think I started writing, really writing, because I couldn’t stop time. But if I could preserve enough of it in words, then technically, it was never lost.
I’ve had a camera running since my early twenties. It has captured most of my life. The people, the places, the solo nights, the faces I love most. The voices are on hard drives. The laughs, the arguments, the conversations that felt too important to let disappear into the air.
And then there’s the writing. Emotions collected by a pen and locked inside a book.
I know I am doing a lot. I also know there is a point where doing more means pulling yourself out of the moment you’re trying to save. I know both of these things. And I still wake up at 2am feeling like it isn’t enough.
That feeling never fully goes away. I don’t think it’s supposed to.
· · ·
Time is the most fascinating and terrifying thing I know. Not death exactly … Time. The passing of it. The weight of it. The way it moves whether you’re paying attention or not.
I hear people say they aren’t afraid of death and I genuinely struggle to believe them. Not because I think they’re lying, but because these are often the same people who need certainty in everything. Who need to know how a story ends before they’ll agree to begin it. Who flinch at anything outside the edges of their comfort zone. And somehow this same person is completely at peace with the greatest unknown there is? I can’t find the logic in that. I don’t think the logic is there.
For me, I think the only way the other side ever becomes acceptable, outside of faith, is if you feel like you did enough with the time you had. Not enough by someone else’s measure. Enough by yours.
· · ·
My best friend just lost his mum. Late-fifties. A hard battle with cancer. And somehow, when she left, by all accounts she had found peace. A life still full of things left to live, grandchildren she hadn’t met yet, ones she loved, travel she hadn’t taken, retirement she hadn’t reached. And still, peace arrived.
I’ve thought about that more than I can explain. What has to happen inside a person for peace to become possible in that moment? What has to be settled? What has to be felt?
I don’t have the answer. But I think about it constantly.
Because for me, the obsession with capturing time and the obsession with not leaving anything unsaid, they come from the same place. Words unwritten. Affection ungiven. Moments that passed before I could hold them properly.
· · ·
There is never enough time. And time is always passing. Those two things are both true simultaneously, and I have never made peace with that contradiction. I’m not sure I want to.
What I do know is this: the feeling of not doing enough is the same feeling that makes me pick up a pen at night. That wakes me up at 2am making me want to reach for my phone to write something down before it disappears. That makes me point a camera at the people I love even when they tell me to put it away.
Maybe that restlessness isn’t a flaw. Maybe it’s the whole reason anything gets made.
