Welcome to the Perceived Passage of Time

 I admit that I've been a little MIA the past month. I swear I have a good reason, but since I don't have to share the details of my life online, I'm not going to explain myself.

Okay - maybe I'll explain myself a smidge. 

I lost track of time. So complain in my comments section.

As I've gotten older, I've realized how precious a resource time is. Much like the money I earn (and then spend), I have to budget my time. I may want to go to bed after midnight, but if I have an 8:00AM meeting, I'm going to be regretting that time I didn't spend sleeping.

Yesterday, I felt like I had all the time I needed this weekend to get everything I wanted to done. I took my time cleaning parts of my apartment and took a very long walk around the neighborhood. Today, as I write this blog post, I notice that I do not in fact have as much time as I wanted. I'm behind on the amount of cleaning and writing I'd hoped to do.

I still did a lot of stuff. My apartment is relatively clean, I was able to take some time to socialize, and I even managed a lovely 1-hour nap (nap time becomes cool again sometime in college - no lies). However, I didn't get all the chores I wanted to done and the only thing I've written is this blog post (which you are now reading).

Where did the time go? Why did it slip through my fingers like ocean waves?

Why is it that the moments I want to hold onto most, fly away the quickest?

I know there's a term for this phenomena, but I'm too lazy lacking the time to look it up. However, I've heard plenty of people complain about how quickly time flies. I've listened to people older (and occasionally wiser) than me inform me that time speeds up as you age.

But how? Physics has taught me that time is a fixed unit...unless relativity is involved. Did I gain so much mass that I'm able to perceive time differently from when I was a child. Or is this a psychological phenomenon connected to the Fibonacci sequence of age? When I'm two years old, half my live happened in one year. So I feel like a year is forever. As a six year old, a month seemed forever because one month was 1% of my life experience? Now a month is less than 0.3% of my life and seems to go by like a NASCAR loop.

I first began to note the passage of time, after my friend's 13th birthday party. I distinctly remember the party - only because I fell asleep first and was the first person to wake up in the morning (boy do I miss being able to do that - my college years really messed up my sleep schedule). I also distinctly remember thinking about the party a week later and wondering why it felt like time had passed so fast. 

Then another week passed...and another.

Suddenly, it was a whole month from my friend's birthday party and I felt like I was feeling time go by. It was a disorienting feeling - one I still get when I want to revisit a very specific memory (usually happy, usually very detailed). 

The best way I can describe the feeling of time passing is trying to stay very still while also being pulled by an invisible force hard enough that I can feel my body losing the battle to stay planted in one spot. The closest examples I could give are feeling a powerful tide going out to see or being on one of those UFO carnival rides - you feel the force moving you, but are stuck against the wall.

I don't know if anyone else has felt this. Most people I've spoken to talk about blinking and suddenly time has leapt forward - your little baby is a sassy preteen. I don't have kids. I blinked and went from living in Maryland to New Jersey. Another blink, and I'm back in my home state of Virginia. I'm curious where this next blink finds me, but I'm also weary. 

I don't want time to slip by too fast, yet it seems to be. In another ten years, a month will be roughly 0.2% of my lived life. More events will have happened, more milestones met. A lot can change in ten years, and just as much can stay the same. I rarely noticed my growth spurts as a little kid, but my relatives who rarely saw me certainly did. 

I've started having that realization too. The kids I babysat as a teen are graduating high-school and college. Some have even become parents themselves. My youngest first cousin is in university and my oldest second cousin once removed is in high-school (I missed out on his whole childhood). Places in my head exist as they did years ago, not as they do today because I haven't been there in so long. When I picture my grandparent's house, it's forever yellow, though the family that lives there now painted it brown.

Time is not a constant. Our perception of time changes with age. For some of us it's a blink. For others, it's a pull that we notice while trying to live in a moment - until that moment is a new one.

I am excited for the future. I enjoy reviewing the past, though I'm sad I can't return to those moments. I love being in the present, even if I sometimes start to mourn the moment because I know how quickly it's over.

Time is a currency. Time is a constant. Time changes with speed and mass. Humans can't control time anymore than we can control the weather.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me.

Until next week.

Welcome to Roses without Thorns

Is a rose still a rose without her thorns?

Granted it's been a little while since I was philosophical, but this question has been bothering me for nonsensical reasons.

Roses are known for their beautiful flowers, delicate fragrance, and nasty thorns. Giving a bouquet of roses is often done between lovers - especially if the color of the roses is dark or deep red. In magic, roses are used to attract love (of many different varieties) and occasionally lust.

They are the flowers of Aphrodite and Venus, goddesses of love, and can convey messages without words (if one were to learn the language of flowers - yes this is a real thing, no I don't feel like getting into it now). They are the preferred flowers for weddings and represent the month of June (which is the month for weddings).

I happen to love the  smell of roses and often have some rose oil around for my hands. I'm also fond of it's fragrance in candles and delicate dried petals in tea blends.

I grew up with roses growing all around me. My grandfather had a rose bush which grew over the front porch of this house. Occasionally the roses would grow too low and it was scary ducking under them to reach the front door. My hair got caught a couple of times in the vines and thorns and had to be carefully removed.

I remember my other grandparents had a huge rose bush in the back yard. If I remember right, it had lovely light pink blossoms that took up a small area of the fence near the back door. I remember once or twice reaching my hand in to pick one of the blossoms and accidentally hitting one of the thorns. I learned quickly not to try to pick the roses without a adult around to help.

Because despite the delicate beauty of the rose blooms, the stems are strong and the thorns sharp. All are meant to defend the plant from animals that might otherwise harm it, like us humans.

Roses may be fragile, but they can defend themselves. Which brings me back to my previous question: is a rose still a rose without her thorns?

Many times when I go to the flower shop, the roses have had their thorns filed down to the point of nonexistence. It makes a bouquet easier to handle and there's no damage to the blossoms or fragrance. The loss of the thorns shouldn't bother me, but it does.

We focus so much on the beauty of the rose, that I feel a loss when it's thorns have been removed.

Most pop culture references are in regards to the beauty and attractiveness of the rose. The famous words uttered by Juliet, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", might be talking about who Romeo is, but the love symbolism isn't lost on the audience. Then there's the visual symbolism found in American Beauty, with deep red rose petals symbolizing the sexual fantasies of a middle aged man towards an under-aged teenager. Honestly I found that comparison incredibly creepy.

And I can't talk about roses without mentioning Beauty and the Beast, where the rose is meant to symbolize both inner and outer beauty. I think in the Disney version, the rose does indeed have thorns, but the blossom itself is the focus of the story. Because the Beast will remain a beast forever once all of the beautiful petals are gone and only the prickly thorns remain (okay I added that last part, but I think it's implied symbolism).

The references to a rose's thorns, though, aren't as frequent, but when they do pop up, they show another side to that beauty. There is the famous Poison song "Every Rose has It's Thorn" and I will forever love Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon throwing a rose with thorns as an awesome weapon. Speaking of anime, in Yu Yu Hakusho the character Kurama has a rose whip that slices and dices people with the rose's thorns built into the wipe. The character even compares himself to Tuxedo Mask at one point in the manga (fun fact: the manga writer of Sailor Moon and the manga writer of Yu Yu Hakusho were married).

One particular instance of roses and their thorns being important to a story's symbolism is in the book Like Water for Chocolate. The main character, Tita, is given a bouquet of white roses by her sweetheart (who also happens to be married to her older sister for a variety of reasons I won't go into here). Tita clutches the roses so tight to her chest that the thorns pierce her skin and her blood turns the roses deep red. She then uses the roses in a chicken recipe (I found this to be a little *cough* lot *cough* on the gross side), which then causes her oldest sister - the one not married to the sweetheart - to burst into pink flames, run naked across a field, and hop on to a horse with a guy to ride off into the night (how I wish this book were about the oldest sister, but I digress).

My favorite part of that book would not have happened if roses didn't have their thorns.

We want our roses to be pretty delicate blooms, easy to handle with a lovely fragrance. We don't want the thorns.

But a rose's thorns are a part of the rose. Taking away the thorns leaves the rose defenseless and sometimes not treated with the same careful respect a rose with thorns might receive.

So I leave you readers with my first question: is a rose still a rose without her thorns?

Until next week!

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or, leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.