Sometimes time passes frantically, like water swirling down the plughole, and at others it seeps out, drip, drip, drip through the cracks, but wherever it goes and however it goes, it goes. Managing time is something I always wrestle with. My mind is on a different time line from the rest of the world, it lives in a place where everything is in the now and it loops and coils back on itself, while linear time forges on around me with grim determination to get from the start of each day to the end and then start again. This has only really become apparent because of writing a journal and going back through it. But it becomes obsessive, repetitive, another way of chewing up the time and spitting it out again.
Time teases me, abandons me, mocks me, ignores me. There is sometimes too little, sometimes too much, never the right amount. It flows and coils around me as I sit in the sunshine, eyes closed, listening to the song of the birds. Why can I never grasp it, master it, do what I need to do with it? I lose it completely, it vanishes from my mind, but it's there in the background, always, moving at its own pace, sometimes with an insistent tick, tick, tick; sometimes with a barely perceptible mummer. Sometimes it creeps up behind me, catches me unawares, takes me up, throws me back onto the shingle, high, higher than ever before, and leaves me gasping, only to pursue me and drag me back again into its undertow.
There is too little, too much, I don't know where to start. Wherever I start, there are too many things which will be ignored. If I focus on one corner of my life, one aspect, then the rest starts to drift away from me. If I had all the time and energy in the world, I could never catch up with myself. And all the time I have is this stream which runs away from me, I cannot grasp it any more than I can grasp the water between my fingers, it passes from my sight, yet still it is here, coming up behind me again.
