Time isn’t a concept, it’s YOUR concept.
To preface this, know that this isn’t going to be a radical post attempting to push conspiracy theories upon you-- that’s a conversation for another time.
But what this blog post is, is a listicle of sorts, a guide to the things I’ve found out in my young adulthood, things that if you told me when I was younger, I wouldn’t have listened to.
But Lunar, you ask, why are you telling me this even if we wouldn’t listen? Well, the answer is simple. That’s what all adults do. We tend to give unprompted advice that younger people say isn’t authentic or end up on one of those edited sunset pictures when searching for quotes on Google. (Or should I say Yahoo since we’re on Tumblr? To each their own, I suppose.) But instead of breaking down the complex reasoning behind a human’s biology as we age, I will give one optimal reason that should sate your curious minds for now.
We don’t accept what we believe isn’t relevant.
Before you start protesting or mention that you specifically are an open-minded individual who takes opinions from every source all of the time, we’re all prone to this. As humans, we want to absorb all of the knowledge we’re given, we’re innately curious creatures, but at some level, if we’re not in the correct mindset to take on or apply this newfound knowledge, then we’ll lose it. This isn’t our fault; we’re just sponges with too much water that need to drain somewhere else before we overflow and flood the place. Everything has its time and place, especially advice.
So, if you’re open and ready to absorb, keep reading. Maybe one of them will stick.
1. You can learn something from anyone.
We often look for people who’ve become great public successes to fuel our own paths. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we’re all individuals with unique mindsets, approaches, and goals.
Take creatives, for example. There are so many well-published authors, artists, and experimenters, but we only pay attention to the ones in the news. We look at the people who have made a living off their work and only care about those who know how to publicize. While marketing is essential, that’s not what we’re all interested in. But what we’re witnessing are people who know how to market and just happen to be in the creative field. Unless you’re specifically looking for marketing techniques, you’re most likely looking in the wrong place.
And now, presumably, you’re asking, “where else do I look for advice then?”. That’s the thing, you don’t really have to look. This is what the advice means, you can learn something from anyone because, I mean literally, everyone. But you won’t know until you talk to them. Everyone has a life separate from yours, and experience teaches more than words. So, speak to that woman standing in line about her interests, ask that bartender who’s serving up mojitos like no one’s business, and talk to that person who happens to be looking at the same wall of video games as you. And if you don’t know what to say?
Ask them the most significant piece of advice they learned the hard way.
In this case, everything is a little less everything and more of the things that we hear from other people. We’re in an age of misinformation, and now more than ever, we are being exposed to decisions that should be backed by valid evidence but aren’t.
When we first read this, we think of online, social media, that one news network that’s actually classified as an entertainment channel (we’re not going to name names, but you should question that as well). It’s good to keep in mind that even if this is the most blatant example, it also comes in the form of direct conversation. We’ve all had opposing views with someone we’ve talked to, whether that’s a family member or some random person at a party, and it can get extremely frustrating when they come up with things you’ve never seen from that side. While we all want to consider ourselves knowledgeable about everything we’re passionate about, we must realize we sometimes miss a perspective or two.
So, take the time to research the points. Get to the root of all discussion and prove it one way or another. We shouldn’t be living in a world where all we do in a conversation is aim to prove the other wrong. Entertain the idea that you might not be considering all the points. One of my favorite quotes I think goes well with this piece of advice is by Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind, to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it (Metaphysics)”; we should strive to be a little more like this quote. We can’t truly be open-minded unless you’ve considered all of your bases, and we can’t fully feel as if we’re correct if we don’t know what’s so wrong about the opposite.
3. “Everyone can cook” -- Ratatouille
If you’ve read my Passion(Fruit) post, you might be catching on to my affinity for the movie Ratatouille. What can I say? It’s a high-quality film. But, that is not the point; the point is that the phrase “everyone can cook” is something inspiring.
Now, I’m not explicitly saying everyone can cook; I like the principle behind it-- that everyone is capable of doing anything. Everyone started somewhere; we didn’t just pop out of the womb understanding how to read; for goodness’ sake, we didn’t even know what reading was. But the gist of the quote is that no matter how complex something might be, you can learn. A brain is a powerful place, a mass neural network capable of processing billions of things all at once, something computers could probably never achieve. We are incredible, and if you have the patience to learn, you can do anything.
The one thing I hear when I tell this quote to people is something along the lines of, “I know.” But I only know a few people who actually take it to heart. This is what I mean by the introduction of this post, we say that we are open to the advice, open to the knowledge from people that have gone through the motions, but we never do.
There’s one popular trend that I’ve seen throughout TikTok, where people will show themselves in a place or situation they never thought they could achieve at that point with the audio that says, “I fear that I may have girlbossed a little too close to the sun,” referencing the story of Icarus, but in their case, they flew all the way and didn’t fall from the heat of the flames. These people underestimated what they could do in those situations, aimed higher than they were told they could, and succeeded. But those people are just another example of why this piece of advice works. We can do anything we put our minds to; nothing stops us; everyone can cook.
4. Progress isn’t always measurable.
We attribute value to progress; it’s inevitable in a society such as ours-- so in projects where we don’t have a reasonable scale of measurement, we tend to fall short or feel hopeless.
Progress isn’t measurable. We have people everywhere looking at us and judging us for what they want to see us do-- but we’re not puppets, we’re not here for their enjoyment, we’re here for ourselves.
One way I can apply this advice to real life is through trauma. We can understand that it lingers when we go through a traumatic event. We can either go one of two ways, repressing it entirely or being haunted by its occurrence-- and we don’t always get a say in which route we go. But we don’t always have to feel weighed down by it.
People who go through traumatic situations have treatment plans and methods of action-- either dictated by a therapist or themselves and the journey to not feeling traumatized is not linear. The path is filled with an assortment of rises and falls. And on occasion, if we think we’re somewhere close to the end, sometimes we’re just a few feet from the start. With trauma, it’s hard to see how we’re faring, and it’s an uphill battle just trying not to get discouraged-- it can feel hopeless at times. But when dealing with trauma, it takes a while to finally understand that progress isn’t always visible to others. Progress is how we feel about it, not how other people view us. Because progress is not always measurable.
Now, this is the piece of advice you’ve been waiting for. The pinnacle of advice that inspires the title for this blog post. You. Have. Time.
I would say that we tend to succumb to the fast-paced society we live in. We’re told what we have to do through our entire childhood and some of our adulthood-- we’re given objectives to complete like, getting a high school degree, getting a job, going to college, getting married, having children. This agreed-upon schedule that generations tend to pursue and push onto the future generations doesn’t let us have a moment to think for ourselves. We’re so strained by the idea that all of these events come directly one after another, we need to multitask to survive in the harsh world, and we’re unnecessarily stressing ourselves out.
This was a hard lesson for me to learn, the concept is so simple, but it took me seeing it on a post when I needed it to finally bring it to heart. The moral of this is, we have time. We have space to prioritize ourselves. Prioritizing ourselves isn’t selfish; it’s necessary. We try to strain ourselves to please others for so much of our life while we have a right to please ourselves. We have the time to build up our skills, and we have the time to enjoy the things we want to enjoy. Our life isn’t divided into deadlines.
I remember being so stressed out by school, the idea of adulthood creeping up on me, and I felt I wasn’t capable of anything because I was both too young and too old. But that’s not the case; not everything has a set age or time for it to be done-- life moves at our pace, not anyone else’s.
