Do you have the Time?

I have this weird fascination with time. First of all, it pisses me off because it makes no sense. It shoots by like the Acme roadrunner on methamphetamines; but when I think about what I did last month, it all seems like a totally different period of time, detached from now. I can’t believe I’m halfway done with college and no matter what I do, time won’t slow down. Seriously, I just sit there without doing anything productive because I think that if I stop moving, maybe the world will catch on and let me take a breather. But it doesn’t.

On the other hand, I love time.  More specifically, I love to think about the progression of time, and what it must have been like to live during World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, The Civil Rights movement. Would I know-as I sat in the crowd and listened to MLK speak, or as I heard about the erection of the Berlin Wall, or as I stitched up a soldier coming off of No Man’s Land-would I know that I was partaking in, witnessing and making history? Or it could have been like it is now, when everything that happens is just a part of life, and it’s difficult to consider it as momentous in history because we can’t perceive how we look from outside this era.

It’s weird, but I read stories that take place during the wars or the momentous social movements, and I feel a sense of yearning. Not because I’m a young, do-nothing who is bored, has no direction in life, and wishes to be given a purpose in order to take away all the struggle in choosing one (well not just because of that). I just want to know what it felt like to be unified behind a common cause—or unified in opposition to that cause.

You know what I think it is? Why I yearn to know what it was like to be someone in that time period? Because I want to know what my identity would be made up of; I want to know who I would be. And that desire is inextricably linked with its sister desire of defining my place in this world, this era. It’s like, because that time has passed, we know who those people were. But this is now and boundaries of identity are already so fluid as it is…so who are we? Who will we be when our grandchildren learn about Occupy and the Arab Spring and the election of Obama? Will those events seem as momentous to them as the Civil Rights Movement, Decolonization, and the election of JFK do to us?

I want to know who I would be to them because I want to know who I am now. But let me clarify: I don’t think this is a desire to classify myself in a rigid definition. I think it’s rooted in curiosity. And it’s so exciting to think about: my present identity is going to be my future children and their children’s history. All I can really do is make it a history worth retelling.