There’s a girl, 26, sitting on a green velvet chair at a small wooden table. Her tennis shoes without laces are off and her feet are playfully tucked in her socks, which are resting in crisscross applesauce quaintly on the chair under her. She has her hair up because the heat outside is hardly bearable. The buildings in her eye line are carved of stone and have details that only remain commonplace with royalty. There are motorcycles going past on the street with two people on them. Cars, too, smaller than she knows. Shadowed foot steps are passing by on the cobblestone side walks, as well as beautiful tanned skin. Barcelona.
She looks down from the window and notices a black fly has flown into her half-filled cappuccino coffee cup. She scoops it out with her spoon and onto the white plate in which her cup resides. The fly is struggling. He is lying in a small puddle of coffee. She moves it with no respite. She desperately wants the fly to get back up and fly again. He’s so close, but he can’t seem to get up. She can’t help him either. The flies’ body turns stagnant and its’ time has ended. It brings her sadness. Death is death after all, and she has always had a sincere empathy for all living beings.
The cappuccino slowly turns into an empty cup of foam and white ceramic. The girl is no-where near the home that she knows. She is quite a ways. As she sits as a foreigner in this far-away home, she ponders, per usual. In this moment, what she ponders is time.
This girl, she has grown to see time as something that needs to be optimized. It is something that needs to be used in the most appropriate fashion for ones’ future. Time should be spent on being the absolute best that one can be. It should be spent creating something that will last. She has the American dream down to its’ wits. More specifically… a Hollywood dream.
Ever since she graduated college 4 years ago, she has used her days to make money, and set herself up for later success. She planted seeds in her acting career, in her professional life, her mindfulness practice, and she’s stayed focused on watering these areas often. She saw time as something that was going to add up at the end of her life. If she didn’t use this time here “well” now, then her future was not going to be what she wanted. What she wanted?
Well… she became hyper-focused on the dream of being a successful actress, having a loving partner, and operating as an optimum efficient being. Time to her became what could happen in the future. Time to her became her meal ticket to success. She isolated herself often, and figured the isolation was only because this was the only way she was going to get to the top.
Time in this new place is different than what she knows. Time to the people in Spain seems to be something that is not counted. It is something that is blossoming each moment. Many people spend 1-2 hours in the middle of their day resting. Their dinners and lunches with each other last much longer than she’s ever known. The restaurants always have people dining at them, no matter what time of day. People are sipping their coffee slowly. They are drinking their wine delicately. They don’t feel a need to fill space with anything. Sometimes there is silence. Sometimes there is noise. She feels the flow of energy here. It has become alive in her, too.
She is taking bites of her food, and she is tasting it. All of it. She is losing weight, without the slightest of effort, because she is present with her meals, for once in her life. She is sipping her coffee slowly, and knowing it need not be finished by a certain hour. She is drinking her cappuccino like the beautiful prized dessert drink that it is. Each bite with a bit of brown sugar tasting oh-so-sweet. Albeit, she is on vacation, so she is in a certain escape of the ticking of the clock.
That is not what is bestowed upon her though. What is bestowed upon her is freedom. This is a freedom that someone from the United States, more specifically Los Angeles, may never know.
She feels the freedom of time. Time in Spain is not something that needs to be squeezed and penciled for weeks before hand. It is something that is unfolding with each new day. The energy is lighter, and the people are softer. They aren’t worried about what’s “next” or the “next” morning. They are just here. It is not uncommon for people to kiss strangers on the cheek. The cab drivers are happy. The community is knit together like a loosely- tied woven blanket.
As this girl observes time… she can’t help but ponder her own use of time. She ponders what she has given her time to, her life. She thinks of the times in her life that have served her most. These are when she was holding someone’s hand, when she was in a new place with friends, the times she got lost writing. She wonders. Hmm? If these were the memories that mattered the most, why had most of the past 4 years hardly comprised of these times? Why had these moments come secondary to her very solitary, ambitious journey?
As she sits in the coffee shop, she can’t help but realize that somewhere along her journey, she had lost what time really meant to her.
Time is not only for the future. Time is here. It is everything happening right now. Death is imminent. Just like the fly in her drink. She knows no matter how well she tries to guess her future, time is not certain. That girl feels fear, because change is difficult. She doesn’t know how to continue, or how to adjust her life with these new lenses. She supposes the lesson is just that, though. To not know. All she knows is that she cannot go back to the way she was. As wise and observant as the girl is, she doesn’t know the future. She feels change breathing into her being. It feels right. That girl, that girl is me…