Slow Down, Set Pace

Getting older hits fast and hard, right into the face of the child who wished away their days; Head first into the mind of the teenager who lied about their age, to seem older and wiser and cooler.

“Slow down, set pace”. That’s what they tell you. Slow down, you have all the time in the world, at least all the time in your world anyways, because in the end that’s the only world that matters. It’s the only world you’ll ever really know. You’ll live every minute in a world which nobody else will ever experience.

Slow down, take off the clothes and the make-up you use to look older than your years. “Slow down, set pace” because every day that passes and every year that falls slowly into place like grains of sand in an hour glass, they’re all yours. They belong to only you; you have all the time in your world.

You’ll find with time that it really is your world, not theirs or ours. It will lose the acrid taste of selfishness soon enough. It won’t seem selfish when you realise that every second, which means so much to you in your world, which seems a lifetime to you as you grow second by second, to another your lifetimes are just seconds, because they have their own world to indulge in and worry about.

“Slow down, set pace” because even the lovers who give each other glimpses into their own worlds in hope of combining them still experience separate lifetimes. Time is a vicious thing which even the intensity of love has no hope of beating as it slips quickly away between your fingers.

And when it comes to the point that your world is slowly falling, collapsing all around you, being sieged by the troops of old age and disease… that’s when you’ll realise. You’ll look back and understand your world was everything to only you. Every lifetime lived in a second is all you ever needed. Your only wish will be to pick through those grains of sand which fell so rapidly, and “slow down, set pace”. You would wish to go back and walk before you ran.