Find Peace, Keep Time

Find Peace, Keep Time: As a kid, time appears to solely be this linear thing that often gets expressed when we say how we can’t wait to grow up. We want to be able to drive, drink liquor, party, go to college, have our own homes, have relationships that aren’t referred to as puppy love, get married, have children, and a bunch of other shit that seems reserved just for adulthood. A lot of us aren’t thinking of mortality in terms of death being a real part of this growing up either until it is.

I know I didn’t. Regardless of knowing death is always a part of life, it didn’t fully settle in that this necessary evil would take away someone I called a parent… until it did. Despite all the times I wished death upon my father when his time did come, I didn’t feel as good as I’d hoped I would. What we’re also not allowed to openly believe is that time DOES NOT heal all wounds. Imagine a time not doing the job of relieving yourself of all your unresolved feelings like so many people claimed it would. Imagine time still not making someone you loved, love you back. Imagine time doing its job of passing for you no differently than it passes for anyone else.

Time is one of the most indiscriminate things that we constantly take for granted. Sometimes we function as if we have a never-ending stream of it and in other moments we act as if we’re always running out, while it continues to flow around and through us, because our perception of it really doesn’t matter.

When my father was first diagnosed with cancer, he was about my age… I think. You see what else time does? We lose track of it as we get older. He beat it though or so we thought. No matter how much time passed that allowed us a modicum of comfortability, it still managed to come back. Cancer doesn’t look at time like anyone or anything else on this planet. Sometimes it erases 40 years of life in 4 years and other times it shaves off a few years but goes away enough for people to regain the appearance of what was lost. The other thing we don’t admit enough is that we can’t make up for any lost time. We like to hope we can but that’s just not how it works. We continue to age and that’s the biggest indicator of time passing us by. One day we look so young that we’re constantly carded and then we blink, and we’re never carded because we move slower, we’ve lost tons of melanin out of our hair, and our smiles are accompanied by sagging jowls, crow’s feet, lines, and wrinkles that spread across our faces, hands, and necks.

My dad lived like time didn’t affect him, like he had all the time in the world to do whatever he needed to do. I couldn’t tell you if that was a delusion or truly how he viewed things. He looked like he could have been my brother up until 4 years before he died, which was only a year ago. He would have been 65 years old this year, but he looked about 104 when he took his last breath. Sometimes this is what time does to you when you’re battling things that should have taken you out a long time ago and it catches up to you. It wasn’t just cancer that ate away at my father’s time. It was his life choices and lifetime of trauma. Despite him not giving me the time of day I wanted and so desperately needed, he did take the time to share things with me that only ravage a person’s spirit… and that affects our view of time, too.

His belief was that if he could experience the horror of childhood trauma and “be okay,” surely his children could and should. I’m here to tell you, my father was never “okay” but that’s something else about time… if we tell ourselves something enough, we begin to believe it regardless of so many years of evidence also telling us what we believe just isn’t true. However, at almost 43 years of age, I’m still here living with the trauma that time hasn’t healed and I’m not okay. The reality about time is that it never stops, and because of that, it can be used to our advantage. I still got some work to do with all the time that’s been pushed aside as insignificant because unlike my father, I’m still here.

What time has done for me is allow me the space needed to pray that I accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; taking this world as it is and not as I would have it; trusting that the universe will honor its own system of balance and harmony and make all things right.

Until then, I will be using the time wisely that I am gifted, to not repeat the mistakes that time didn’t fix for my father.

(originally published in Issue 3 of the Find Peace, Keep Peace journal

publisher: colour bloc creative)