Time is a mindfuck. (pardon my French, there is literally no other accurate way to express this. I even asked Googled.)
You can accomplish more in a minute than in a lifetime, but sometimes it takes a lifetime to get to that minute.
We place so much faith in clocks, deadlines, expiration dates, and other scheduled confines of time to mould our experiences because it allows us to create a sense of control over our worlds and perhaps, manage to live less anxious, nerve-wracked experiences until the only time that we’re all promised comes, or rather, ends.
Nine months ago, my life changed beyond the point of repair with the passing of my beloved grandfather. Over the span of my 24 years, he was such a fundamental force of care, inspiration, and love in my upbringing that his loss has felt emotionally devastating and painfully palpable with every second of every minute of every day. No amount of time with him would feel long enough, and nearly no amount of time has ever felt shorter.
In three short weeks following a two-minute phone call one Tuesday morning in September, time began to dwindle shorter and span longer than I’d ever experienced. It was the beginning of the end of time as I’d known it. It was…a mindfuck.
Over the past nine months, I have been struggling to find my way back to some semblance of self beyond the dissonance of grief. Or some semblance of anything, really. Though my experience hasn’t exactly been aimless, I would argue that I have been reeling in “Lost Without A Cause” territory with no updates on an exit plan or departure date. (My therapist says it takes at least as long as you know someone to fully grieve them, but 48 is quite a long ways away and even then, my soul will feel the deficit.) My goal has just been to make sinking look elegant and composed so as not to strike any alarms.
In the same three-week span that devastated me beyond repair, I have found myself healed beyond conception:
My time in Bahia allowed my spirit to resurface from the bellows of my grief.
To reintroduce myself to myself.
To get to know her again.
To learn how to love her the way she needs to be loved again.
To reflect on the legacy my grandfather bravely paved for me and the rest of his descendants through his life’s work. To mourn his loss, get lost in the grief, and then find humility in the incredible task of his spiritual ascension and ancestral omniscience. The journey of transmuting mourning into a celebration of life gave me a type of bond that I wouldn’t have been able to experience during his life.
As I moved through my time in Bahia, it began to feel like a cosmic alignment that was curated in the heavens. I felt like his spirit led me to voyeur bravely through the wild unknown of the world and brought me back to South America, the continent he left so long ago to come and tend to his grandchildren. It felt as if he had introduced me to an element of himself that I was never able to recognize or interpret in his time on Earth, a part of his legacy that now lives through me.
I made my way back home with much more than I stood to gain before I left.
To the process of growth.
And then, back to the beginning of understanding self all over again.
What I have gained in this experience supersede the price paid in student loans (undergrad, graduate, and every cent of interest collected in between), in sleepless, homework-filled nights, and in aimless but graceful sinking below surfaces without end dates. Through my time in Bahia, I have gained something internal that no person, nor experience, nor force of nature can ever take from me again. I’ve gotten my time back, because I’ve chosen to remove its confines and embrace it’s fluidity. I’ve gained perspective.
Sometimes, most of the time really, it’s not even about time, but about the experiences that you embark upon and the ways they feed you that we come to recognize through time. It can be a minute climbing Pão de Ignacio. It can be a lifetime of internal reflection. Everything just depends on what works for you.
And Salvador came to me, or rather I came to it, at just the right time.
Okay, the plane is taking off now.
It’s been real, Salvador.
