It’s always around this time of the year, when the temperature finally cools and the humidity dissipates, that the chit chat I have with both close friends and strangers begins to revolve around the subject of time. The slight tinge of red on leaves, the gradual reorientation of coffee orders from iced to hot, and the resurgence of pumpkin-everything usher us into a new chapter of the year. We can’t believe it’s already September again. It’s a surprise that derives from the daze of summer — the feeling that June will never become July and July never August and such forth. As the new season begins to announce its arrival, we are reminded of how quickly months can slip away and how soon we will need to unpack our down jackets from storage even though it feels as if we just put them away last week.
A few years ago, September marked the start of a new school year. Now over two years out of college, the only reminder I have of a time where my concerns revolved around student orgs, summer internships, and class loads, are the depleted shelves of the home goods sections in Targets around the city and the uptick in the number of nervous NYU families passing through Washington Square Park. In college, time was regulated by the next deadline or graduation date. Without those external mechanisms, time seems to meld together, months and years bleeding together into an unnavigable haze.
I spent the better part of August traveling up the west coast, starting my way from San Diego then meandering through Los Angeles and San Francisco, then finally settling for a week in Seattle. Visiting this side of the country has become a sort of summer tradition — a time to catch up with friends and family while spending countless hours either wading in the oceans of Southern California or walking through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
With my routine in the city disrupted, meandering became my primary mode of operating. In San Diego, I spent hours sitting aimlessly at a seaside park chatting away with whomever had come with me that day to engage in my coffee and pastry at the park routine. In Los Angeles, my friends Amy, Neha and I spent hours wandering around the Arts District killing time before our dinner reservation. We rode an electric scooter up and down a quiet street, smelled every scent at Le Labo with no serious intent of purchase, then visited an arts & design bookstore, where Neha proceeded to buy a book on Studio Ghibli.
As we exited the store, we talked about the books we saw and how interesting it would be to deep dive into topics like typography or architecture. We talked about the countless hours it would take to become an expert in any subject area, and what it might look like to become one ourselves.
“There’s so many people out there who say they’ll do something later, and then never do it. They say maybe next year, and then that year becomes two and so on,” my friend Neha said. The words were something I had heard versions of before, wound up in adages about making the most of one’s life. But upon hearing them this time, they felt revelatory, the accumulation of similar sentiments that I had picked up over the years from essays, books, and older friends and family members, finally consolidated into a realization about the significance behind my daily course of actions, that who I am and how I choose to spend my time are inseparable.
It is only recently that I’ve become more cognizant of the distinction between time and change. Time is a medium for change, and not change itself. As you grow up, people ask you about who you want to become, but do not tell you what it means to get there. It is not until you are coming into adulthood when you must reconcile between the time you think you have and the time you wield in your hand. It is then when you are confronted by the push and pull between action and inaction and when you must learn to recognize when patience is no longer what’s necessary to move forward.
If you choose to, willingly or unwillingly, you can spend a lifetime suspended in the present infinite, believing that the tomorrows will always be plentiful. Tomorrow, you will learn the language you want to learn, visit the place you have always wanted to go, take a day for yourself, stay better in touch with the people you care about. You can spend a lifetime wishing for time to catalyze change.
In the month since returning from my trip, I’ve sought to renew my own vows to myself I had let slip away in the past years. I started taking French lessons and listening to Chinese podcasts. I have committed to working on a longer writing project. I have started to protect my alone time more, knowing that saying yes to every plan, albeit fun, sometimes takes you further from who you want to be.
A few days ago, I shifted my morning run to an evening run. I am ten weeks into a half marathon training plan I started because I wanted to run 13.1 miles without injury. It was a day where running was the last thing I wanted to do, but knew that I had to in order to be prepared for the race in a few weeks.
As I ran down the West Side Highway, my body slowly came to life. I watched the city lights glinting across the currents of the Hudson River, the dark water appearing as though it was shimmering. It was rhythmic — water moving in symbiosis with my own strides and the strides of the hundreds of other people also running alongside it.
My pace was faster on this run than it had been during my previous weeks of training. My strides felt strong. I stopped regularly checking my watch because I didn’t want to distract myself from the internal cadence I had set and only occasionally glanced at it to know when to turn around. It was freeing. There were no numbers and no dread of how much was left. There was only me and the place I was running toward.
Each step I took was reinforced by my previous weeks of training — my body, better acquainted with the load of increased mileage in the past months, now more capable of longer, faster strides. When I finished my run, I discovered that I had run faster than I ever had run five miles before, clearing my previous fastest time by a little over six minutes. At the beginning of my training, I had never thought I would be able to maintain a sub-nine minute pace for long, but on this run, I started believing otherwise, that I was more capable than I thought.
I can’t say for certain the person I’ll be in the future. I still am at a loss for words when people ask me where I see myself in a few years. There is so much I do not have control over, but what I do have are my promises to myself and the actions that demonstrate these intentions.
It’s September again. The leaves will soon begin to litter the ground, but they haven’t fallen yet. I take one step, then the next, each step ingraining itself into my present, becoming an inerasable part of who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming.
lovely saturday morning read ❤️
this is really really good, thanks for sharing