I’m in my mid-20s, my life is just getting started, right? Wrong.
The fact is, I feel like the amount of time I have isn’t enough. The first time I realized that time flew by sooner than I cared for it to, was when I graduated high school. Just like that, my school days were over and I was onto bigger things, heading to a college that would probably dictate my career for the decades that followed. But since then, my paucity of time has a lot more to do with the people in my life.
COVID-19 has allowed me to spend a lot of time with my parents. I haven’t been with them for this long since 2014. I treasure every day, but it just doesn’t feel enough. The days have blurred into months and before I know it, I’ll be on my way to my first job. Then, the ‘grind’ begins. Work, bills, more work, sit in the office for 12 hours, ‘prove’ myself, all of that crap. All of that so I can afford the quality of living I want in a town that is more expensive than it has any right to be.
The work will become my life. I want to travel, be with the people I love and make more memories with my family. But it increasingly feels like the time for all of that is running out. This isn’t to say that I’m not looking forward to starting work, I am! But then what? The idea of paying bills and rent just seems so…boring. Everything will inevitably revolve around work. Holidays, trips, meeting people, all of it. It’s not a phenomenon unique to me, it’s just the way of the world.
While the reality will probably be different, the need for more time is really hitting me during the COVID-19 era. It’s really hitting me that I want more time with my parents, not even to do fun stuff, but just to be together. I’m realizing that I want to go to college to replace the aborted conclusion it received with a real one; one full of tears, happiness and memories. But perhaps for the first time in my life, it is dawning on me that time is running out. All of it reminds me of a line from Dead Poets Society, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
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I feel that just the way things are today, we’ve moved away from the poetry of life towards what is necessary. While that holds an important place in life for me, I see the poetry diminish in the years to come, and that is terrifying. I do what is necessary for my mental health, but overall, I yearn for a life of poetry, beauty, romance and love.
Perhaps this cynicism is a by-product of the state of the world. A world ensconced in pain, death, corruption and corporations bleeding the planet dry. This is a world that needs poetry, but is no longer one that really deserves it. As I, along with my compatriots enter the world in earnest for the first time, it’s one that carries us from one thing to the next and before you know it, it’s all gone. Doing what’s necessary for life, but that’s about it. I yearn for the poetry that I hope life awaits me, though I don’t know where or how the first verse begins. Poetry can’t be written in the few minutes in-between what’s necessary. It requires time, time I don’t believe the world allows us to have anymore.
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What do you yearn for?
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