“You have your whole life to practice yoga. That’s the beauty of it” . I think what my Brooklyn yoga instructor was trying to say is that time is always in your hands when the goal is lifelong. Time is something I have a lot of as a 26 year old.
I’m sitting again in my Brooklyn coffeehouse where I have become a regular over the past few months, the weekend routine whenever not on call has become to keep busy all day long, to sublimate so as not to dwell on my perpetual existential crisis. Yet a leopard cannot change its spots.
In his short novel "what is left to you", the Arab existentialist Ghassan Kanafani raises the question: what is left once you lose everything you had and find yourself alone in a desert looking for home again. It is a call to transcend one's own existence into some form of essence or action. The notion of time highly dominates his novel and marks it.
Personally, the idea of wasting time irritates me. I always have to be on the move to reinvent myself. When a Lebanese acquaintance I had just met at a NYC event suggested I get a local girlfriend to pass the time, the thought simply could not penetrate my mind. How can you keep someone around only because you need the clock to run faster? You are better than that. At least I think I am. Let's not mind the fact that happiness should not be contingent on others, time wasting is really the lowest form of time investment. I haven't picked up on this concept much yet in American culture but it is true that in Lebanon, we are raised to think time is the enemy and we need to kill it. If your time is hard to kill then please by all means change your living situation, because nothing is more unfortunate than wasted human potential. Now in contrast to the Lebanese who have too much time to waste, the notion of time flight has been greatly emphasized across history, more so in the romanticism literary movement. Lamartine was one of the major proponents of this thinking and he wrote endless poems on the flight of time through the eyes of nature and his lover. Although I absolutely love his Le Lac poem and have spent so many hours looking at the Genevan Lac Leman while reciting it, I am first and foremost an existentialist, and to me, as appealing as romanticism can be, watching your time waste away deprives you of your humanity. You may argue that existentialism is not a humanism but that is a whole different conversation which we won't get to here. I believe our goal in this life should be to find the drives which help us invest our time rather than pass it. I have been trying too hard to sublimate in the past few weeks to the point that sleep has become a commodity. From yoga classes, to gym classes, to writing and to random encounters with intellectuals. Yet there isn't really a proper way to quantify how much of my time is investeable. What is the right way to use my time. To go back to my acquaintance's comment, I should be thinking who am I to say what it the proper way to invest time? As long as the investor is content, it should be acceptable. I think this is a dangerous fallacy. You see the easy way out may often be appropriately numbing and with 7 billion humans on the planet, there is no need for all of them to be striving to make their life goals purposeful. What's wrong with a little leisure? Nothing. Yet how much of yourself remains if you strive to waste away all the possible experiences only because the easier ones flow smoothly. I guess the question is, would you rather ride your boat in a lac or down a waterfall on the stream of life? Which kind of person will you be?
To go back to Kanafani's story, and in attempt to shed a different light on the issue, what is left to you when you are thrown in the desert looking for a home? Yourself and all the time in the world to figure out what to do next.
I’m sitting again in my Brooklyn coffeehouse where I have become a regular over the past few months, the weekend routine whenever not on call has become to keep busy all day long, to sublimate so as not to dwell on my perpetual existential crisis. Yet a leopard cannot change its spots.
In his short novel "what is left to you", the Arab existentialist Ghassan Kanafani raises the question: what is left once you lose everything you had and find yourself alone in a desert looking for home again. It is a call to transcend one's own existence into some form of essence or action. The notion of time highly dominates his novel and marks it.
Personally, the idea of wasting time irritates me. I always have to be on the move to reinvent myself. When a Lebanese acquaintance I had just met at a NYC event suggested I get a local girlfriend to pass the time, the thought simply could not penetrate my mind. How can you keep someone around only because you need the clock to run faster? You are better than that. At least I think I am. Let's not mind the fact that happiness should not be contingent on others, time wasting is really the lowest form of time investment. I haven't picked up on this concept much yet in American culture but it is true that in Lebanon, we are raised to think time is the enemy and we need to kill it. If your time is hard to kill then please by all means change your living situation, because nothing is more unfortunate than wasted human potential. Now in contrast to the Lebanese who have too much time to waste, the notion of time flight has been greatly emphasized across history, more so in the romanticism literary movement. Lamartine was one of the major proponents of this thinking and he wrote endless poems on the flight of time through the eyes of nature and his lover. Although I absolutely love his Le Lac poem and have spent so many hours looking at the Genevan Lac Leman while reciting it, I am first and foremost an existentialist, and to me, as appealing as romanticism can be, watching your time waste away deprives you of your humanity. You may argue that existentialism is not a humanism but that is a whole different conversation which we won't get to here. I believe our goal in this life should be to find the drives which help us invest our time rather than pass it. I have been trying too hard to sublimate in the past few weeks to the point that sleep has become a commodity. From yoga classes, to gym classes, to writing and to random encounters with intellectuals. Yet there isn't really a proper way to quantify how much of my time is investeable. What is the right way to use my time. To go back to my acquaintance's comment, I should be thinking who am I to say what it the proper way to invest time? As long as the investor is content, it should be acceptable. I think this is a dangerous fallacy. You see the easy way out may often be appropriately numbing and with 7 billion humans on the planet, there is no need for all of them to be striving to make their life goals purposeful. What's wrong with a little leisure? Nothing. Yet how much of yourself remains if you strive to waste away all the possible experiences only because the easier ones flow smoothly. I guess the question is, would you rather ride your boat in a lac or down a waterfall on the stream of life? Which kind of person will you be?
To go back to Kanafani's story, and in attempt to shed a different light on the issue, what is left to you when you are thrown in the desert looking for a home? Yourself and all the time in the world to figure out what to do next.
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