Memories, Social Media and the Secret to Transforming Time

TIME IS A THIEF.

My first memory was not my first memory, it was simply all that was left after time erased the first eight years of my life. Time took away my dad so it took any memory of him too.

Time is a thief. And it is relentless.

Time threatened to kill me shortly after college. When the tumor didn’t do the job, time went ahead and took away my ability to hear normally and the chance of a ordinary physical decline. Time erased my past and manipulated my future.

Years of personal baggage and engaging in the nattering insouciance of social media can make someone pretty cynical. After all, social media is a Shangri-La for time and its treachery, moving from one derisive thought to the next without care. The waves crash over us so hard and fast we lunge for the surface with hyperbole, defensiveness, offhanded statements, meanness, feigned empathy and brutal if not always self-serving honesty.

Social media is just another manifestation of time’s influence over our actions.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I can change my relationship with time by changing my perception.

I used to think that time was evil, that it came with all the hardship and despair it could carry. I thought time was something to fight or avoid. Time made every moment of every day a battle I was bound to lose.

But now I see time as something that arrives empty, innocent. As something vacant ready to be filled with possibility rather than dread.

Time arrives as a stranger. Every moment, every slice of time, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is an opportunity to transform ourselves.

We can slow time down and make more of our moments matter. No one said the Internet had to be fast or that time demanded we participate every waking second. Social media is a wonderful window but it’s also a mirror. We can decide what reflection we want to see.

Time took my past but I’m stealing my future back. One day time will stop coming for me — it will win. But until then, time is all mine.