Calling time on Halloween

How did this happen? How did we arrive at this point in our lives? Go on, cast your minds back. Doesn’t it genuinely feel as though the sum of our years can be condensed into nothing more than a few measly, pathetic seconds? Sure, it’s easy to focus on the edited highlights of “special” moments. But as far as a start-to-finish timeline goes – BANG – it’s five seconds in length, tops. Or is this just me?

Time seems to be accelerating as we get older. Remember being seven? Everything passed in a blur of colour and sound, days would feel like an eternity, time stretching ahead seemingly endless.

Then something strange happened. Time became a cruel mistress. Things began to speed up – around the time school took a turn towards the serious – and years felt like months, months passed like days, days into hours, hours became seconds. Seconds themselves don’t happen anymore.

University hasn’t helped the process. The arrival each year of a new band of eager, wretched Freshers only serves to remind us of the passage of time. It seems like yesterday that we started as first years, incontinent with excitement. Now, graduation comes tomorrow, just around the corner.

The process is surely exponential. Next is the stage where we shut our eyes and we’re suddenly middle-aged; blink, and before you know it, summer has become winter. Life just doesn’t stop turning. It’s like Disney but without the frills, or the hope, or the empathy.

Where does all the time go? Taking an existential approach, what is it anyway? If certain European scientists are to be believed, time has already happened. I’ve already written this. You’ve already read it. By now we’ve all moved on with our days, probably a smidge less optimistic, but who cares about that. Those emotions have already happened too, a thought likely to depress everyone still further, thus creating a time-loop likely to exist until the end of time. Which has already happened.

There seems to be no escape. We are all victims of our own consciousness. Our twisted relationship with time surely develops around the time we are first able to stare into the face of Death and fully understand what stares back. From then on every infernal measurement of the passing days resembles a countdown to our own demise. Everything bears a clock: phones, laptops, televisions… even watches now have additional, smaller clocks embedded in their faces. Is no one else as obsessed by this?

Time dances a slow waltz with the end. Tick following tock following tick. There is no escape. Worse still, as a society we meander around the subject. It is the gigantic elephant in the room: an elephant adorned in a top hat, tails, monocle and pocket watch. How do we live our lives so calmly, why is there not chaos?

You probably think there is a form of generic uplifting message to conclude, something to suggest making the most of all the time which remains. Well no. This isn’t Disney (see above). Panic, people (again, see above); be afraid. The Boar sends you seasons’ greetings this Halloween. We suggest you celebrate the opening of the spirit world in suitably ethereal fashion. Enjoy your parties, but don’t dress up as Dracula, Frankenstein or a Werewolf: go as a wrist-watch. It’s far more terrifying.