A Long Way to Go

A day, a week, a year; these are all spans of time that I can wrap my mind around.  When I start thinking about decades, centuries, or millenniums though, my meager little brain gives out.

I’m 25 years old, and while that’s still relatively young, sometimes it feels as if time is slipping through my  fingers.  Everyday that goes by is another that I will not get to live again.  And while this seems obvious, I find the implications nearly incomprehensible.  How many days do I have left?  Am I optimizing each and every day?

The real mind fuck doesn’t come until I start asking myself if it even matters.  I stopped believing in a higher power years ago, but the reverberations of that realization are still echoing through my brain.  If the only meaning to life is that which I ascribe to it, then, well then I don’t know what.

Most of the time none of it really matters.  I just go about my day to day, doing the things that people do.  I eat, I sleep, I take some photos, I play some video games, and then I go to bed.  Human beings have been reiterating some variation of this cycle since the dawn of time. 

So, what’s really important?  Is it important that I find answers to these questions that ebb and flow in my mind?  Or is it only important that I ask these questions?  Or is the real answer that none of it matters, because we’ll all end up worm food in the end anyways?

For being quantitative, time sure is abstract.  To get my bearings, I went out yesterday and photographed some old abandoned farm trucks.  I’m not for sure exactly what model these trucks are, or how long they have been abandoned, but I would guess they’re around half a century old.  Fifty years, simultaneously an infinitesimally small speck in the history of the universe, and yet time enough for humanity to reinvent itself many times over.