122024 : Entry One : I'm afraid of time
The stars have always been there. Even now, as you read this, they burn far away, their light stretched thin by the infinite black between us and them. They are constant, timeless in a way that feels almost mocking. Their brilliance is measured in billions of years, their distances in unfathomable miles. And us? We’re just a flicker. A spark. A tiny, fleeting moment that barely registers in the grand cosmic void.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how strange time is - how it feels so immediate and pressing when we live it, yet so insignificant when we step back and try to see the whole picture. The days blur together, but we anchor ourselves with rituals and routines, with coffee mugs that stain our mornings, and calendars that promise future plans. We try to convince ourselves we’ve harnessed time, boxed it into neat little hours, but it’s an illusion. Time moves, with or without us.
And if I’m honest, that scares me. There’s something so profoundly unsettling about time’s inevitability. About the way it continues forward, indifferent to what I do or don’t do. No matter how I feel, no matter how much I might want to pause or rewind, the seconds keep slipping past. There’s no stopping it, no way to slow it down or bargain for just a little more.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m running against it, trying to catch up to a finish line I can’t even see. Other times, I feel like I’m paralyzed by it, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of its inevitability. And so, I avoid things. Important things. Meaningful things. Because if I don’t start something, I don’t have to watch it end. If I don’t make a decision, I can pretend there’s more time to think about it. But time doesn’t wait for me. The days I let slip by are lost, as irretrievable as footprints washed away by the tide.
It’s a strange kind of fear, this fear of time. It’s not like fearing the dark, or heights, or spiders. Those are tangible, and immediate. Time is quieter, subtler, but no less menacing. It’s always there, ticking in the background, pushing me forward whether I’m ready or not. It reminds me of Sartre’s idea that we’re free to create our own meaning but are burdened by the responsibility of that freedom. Time is the same: it gives us a space to act, but it also holds us accountable for what we do with it.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder if this fear of time is also a kind of reverence. Maybe it’s because I know how fragile it is, how fleeting. The moments we get are so few, so brief, and they’re gone before we even realise how much they mattered. Time’s relentlessness is terrifying, yes, but it’s also what makes it precious. The fact that we can’t hold onto it forces us to cherish what little of it we have.
Still, there are days when that understanding doesn’t feel like enough, when I feel like I’m just watching the clock tick, unable to move. But even then, I try to remind myself: time isn’t just something that takes. It’s also something that gives. Every second is a chance to begin, to create, to connect. And maybe that’s how we - or I fight the fear. Not by defeating it, but by living in spite of it.
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote:
"I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them... there is nothing.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
It’s a strange comfort, isn’t it? The idea that there’s no meaning beyond what we give to right now. Sartre’s philosophy rejects the idea of inherent meaning in time, or in anything at all - it’s up to us to decide if this fleeting moment, this breath in the infinite expanse, matters.
But how do you hold onto a moment when it’s already dissolving? Time feels fast, like a river that rushes past us no matter how desperately we try to cling to its banks. Yet it’s also slow, isn’t it? It creeps, unrelenting, so quiet that the changes it brings are invisible until we look back. A year ago feels like yesterday until we measure the distance between who we were and who we are now.
The worst part about this fear of time is how much it takes from me. Not because it steals moments, but because I give them up so easily. I let opportunities pass me by, not because I don’t want them, but because it all feels like so much pressure and once I start I won't be able to stop and what if I fail. It’s like standing at the edge of something vast, knowing that once I step forward, I can’t go back. So, I linger on the edge, convincing myself there’s always more time, that I’ll do it tomorrow, or next week, or whenever I finally feel ready.
But readiness never comes. And the moments slip away.
I lose out on experiences I wanted to have, on relationships I wanted to nurture, on words I wanted to say but didn’t. And it hurts. It hurts more than I’m willing to admit sometimes because every lost moment feels like a tiny piece of myself slipping into the void. I look back on the things I didn’t do, the chances I didn’t take, and I feel this ache - a quiet regret that hums under the surface of everything. And I can't go back in time and change it.
And yet, even as I feel that ache, even as I tell myself next time will be different, I find myself doing it again. I hesitate. I avoid. I make excuses to soothe the discomfort, to convince myself I’m not really losing anything, even when I know I am. There’s a safety in staying still, in avoiding the risk of failure or disappointment. But there’s also a kind of grief in it - a slow, steady mourning for all the things I’ve let slip through my fingers. And it's me. It's my fault
I wish I could say I’ve found a way to stop. That I’ve learned to push past the fear and seize the moments as they come. But the truth is, I’m still learning. I still find myself hesitating, watching the clock tick forward, feeling the pull of time and the weight of my own avoidance. Some days, I feel stuck in a cycle I don’t know how to break.
But I’m trying. I’m trying to remind myself that the things I fear losing are already slipping away when I do nothing. That the pain of missing out doesn’t sting any less just because it’s self-inflicted. And that maybe, just maybe, the only way to make peace with time is to face it head-on, to let go of the illusion of control and embrace the fleeting, fragile moments for what they are. Because while time keeps moving, so do we.
Sartre would argue that this tension between time’s weight and insignificance is where our freedom lies. If time doesn’t care, if the stars will still burn after we’re gone and the void will remain, then we’re free to create meaning in the moments we do have. We can choose to fill our fleeting time with light - however small that light may seem.
And yet, there’s a melancholy in that freedom. We’re tasked with building something against the inevitable. The stars don’t care what we create; they burn with indifferent brilliance, as they always have and always will, until they, too, are burned out and swallowed by time, leaving behind blackness that we won't witness. Time doesn’t pause to admire our efforts. A book finished, a campaign completed, a lifetime lived... it all fades, and eventually, the void will swallow even the memory of it.
A book finished, a campaign completed, a lifetime lived. Each feels monumental in its moment. And yet, they are swallowed by the void all the same. The stories we weave around a table with friends, the scribbled notes in margins, the carefully plotted arcs of characters who only live in our imaginations... they hold weight for us, for a time. But that weight doesn’t last.
Even the things we think might endure - the great works of art, the towering achievements of human civilization - will fade. The libraries will burn, the monuments will crumble, and the stars themselves will one day exhaust their light. Eventually, there will be no one left to remember. The void will take everything.
It’s a haunting thought, isn’t it? That the things we treasure most - our creations, our memories, our connections - are destined to disappear. It can make our efforts feel small, even futile. Why pour ourselves into something that will ultimately be erased?
And yet, we do. We write the book, play the campaign, live the life. We cling to these fleeting moments and imbue them with meaning, not because they will last, but because we are here to witness them. The act of creating, of experiencing, is its own kind of defiance - a refusal to let the inevitability of the void strip us of our humanity.
There’s beauty in defiance. The melancholy doesn’t negate it, it deepens it. Knowing that our efforts are temporary doesn’t make them worthless. It makes them precious. A story told only once is no less valuable than one retold a thousand times. In the end, the value isn’t in the permanence of what we create - it’s in the act of creation itself, the fleeting joy of shaping something against the infinite.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe meaning doesn’t come from permanence. It’s not about building something that outlasts us, it’s about the act of building itself. It’s the moments we spend staring at the stars, not the stars themselves. It’s the stories we tell, even if no one is around to hear them later.
In the end, we are small. Our lives are short, and our moments are fragile. But in this fleeting, insignificant time, we can still burn brightly. We can float, for a while, staring at the stars. And maybe that’s enough.