Little Enough to Spare

A few weeks ago, I came across an essay by the late Marina Keegan, a beautiful piece of writing marking the end of her time at Yale. "The Opposite of Loneliness" is an exploration of the uncertainty of the transition from college into life afterwards, and so much more than that, yet I was struck particularly by a line within. In disparaging the idea that once you leave college it is too late to change anything, she remarks that "We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." Yet sadly, Keegan had very little time; she died in a car crash not long after her graduation.

I admire the essay, and know that the line I cite is in service to the larger point of it. But I disagree. You don't have all the time in the world, even at twenty-two, even if you live to be ninety. The worst thing, the absolute worst, that you can do to yourself is to in any way justify your life by saying there is still plenty of time. 

I've been writing in some form or other for as long as I can remember, writing story after story throughout high school and pushing them onto teachers who quite kindly read and commented on them. But once I got into college, I stopped writing, even though I loved it and knew then as I still know that writing is what I want to do with my life. I told myself that I needed to focus on college, that I could take up writing again sometime down the road, maybe at the end of my first career when I decided that I needed a change. There would be time, but not just then. After a few years of inactivity, years of not-writing, I realized that there were people in their late teens and early twenties who were already doing what they wanted, already achieving great things. They were not waiting for a distant future moment to follow their passions. If they could do it, what was I waiting for? Why did I find it acceptable to think that I could stop doing what I loved, and perhaps pick it up again in my thirties?

You do not have all the time in the world. We're limited by all manner of constraints, not just by the biological limits to our lives but hemmed in by work and school and obligations to family, each one eating away at the time we have. The remainder is easy to use up, as there is so little of it. Putting off doing what you want to do, what you need to do, is so easy when you tell yourself there is plenty of time. 

The hours blend into days, days become months and before you realize it years have churned on, and you wonder how it's been two years since you finished your degree, and how can it seem both like yesterday and yet so impossibly long ago now? Can it be true that I was a library director for over a year? I know that it is, but it seems like it cannot have been that long. Has it really been four years since I graduated, and was looking eagerly ahead to the end of working in retail and starting my master's program? Yes, you may be young, but you do not have all the time in the world, at least, not as much as you think. I may be twenty-six, but time seems to pass with ever-increasing swiftness with each successive year. 

You do not have all the time in the world. So why are you content to keep doing what you've always done, always thinking that you can start on your dreams, on realizing the life you want, tomorrow, next week, some day? Time is finite, and there is little enough to spare.