Health And Beauty

Time is a tricky thing to judge. Minutes and hours, now they're easy, clocks and watches, coupled with our attention span, make for easy pickings. Days, well, tougher. Have you ever tried to watch a day pass? It can be done but you'll lose a lot of it. You'll drift, and then come back, and again, happy clock will tell you what you missed, but for the most part you can watch a day. Feel the weight of a day. A day spent watching is a heavy thing indeed, but at least you can be pressed by the weight of it.

Beyond a day though, it all becomes much trickier. To focus on a week, or a month, or a year, to watch it pass, visibly see it move by you, is a fool's errand. How does one judge the movement of time on such scales. The human mind is not built to see that. To focus that long on time. To watch a year pass, we cannot hold our focus so. So, instead, as I have come to realise, between the breaks of focus, between the moments we realise we've forgotten to count the tick of the metronome, the beat of the heart, however one chooses to keep watch, our clever little minds fill in the blank time, the unseen time, with, for want of a better word, 'meaning'. It constructs a narrative of how time was spent. It bundles it up and provides you with a neatly packaged story for all that time you had missed watching. Why, of course, is a different question. Perhaps we have evolved to fix time linearly to give ourselves the sense of urgency of the life insists upon. How else does one respond to the urgency of life without the packages of stories to serve to fill in the lost count, to fill in the moments when we stopped watching time tick by.

Yet, there remains the singular clock of our lives. The only one that truly gives meaning to the bundles of times our mind packages. For we could gather them forever, were we not reminded that each bundle becomes more precious as it gets closer to the last. It is the slow but inevitable metamorphosis into time. Time ossified within us. The greying of hair. Skin which recoils from the world. The spent joints and dimmed senses. I am a calendar. Splayed out, with days roughly crossed out by a hand callous of the days before. I am the true clock, with which to count my days. The mirror, that cursed invention, my clock face. What did my ancestors do without this reminder? Was age something felt alone? Was it a sense? Would we simply know that right time to crawl beneath the house to be alone, to pass? And between those times, between the first morning and the final night, was there simply a moment of being. Cursed are we that, so vain, believed the mirror gave us sight into how the world saw us, not knowing that in its invention we created the only clock capable of truly measuring time beyond days, that could truly capture the length of a life.

It is no surprise then that we spend so much of our later years hiding the tick the clock from ourselves, from the world. To fill in the cracks of time simply to deceive ourselves. We craft the image reflected back to hold back the clock. Health and beauty are not simply what we want to feel better. They are what we need to hold back the clock. The clock we've always had within us. The clock which has always counted down. If each breath, if each heart beat, is simply a next turn of a wound cog, then all I am is wound time, tensed up, slowly unspooling on to the floor, unaware how many turns the blind watchmaker gave me. With atomic frequency, my thoughts count its passing, while my bones click in time with the seconds. The half-life of emotions and ideas once so important demure in slow, radioactive decay. We are all unstable nuclei. I am a wind-up toy.

Why? Why do we slowly transition back into the soft clay from which we came? Definition lost, our colour blends into one, we merge into a great mass of the old, become a symbol, a marker, a queue for the boat. The loss, or perhaps more precisely, the change, the transition, the slow decay of health and beauty, is, or at least must be, a reminder. It is