Time is Neutral

I used to write whenever I traveled. From the time I was very small, I carried a notebook in the car and would scribble away while we drove across the country on a move or a family trip. I couldn't go anywhere without a pen and paper. I'm not sure when I stopped writing while traveling, or why. Maybe it's related to my discovery that NyQuil is an effective way to avoid flight anxiety, or when I realized that much of my writing done in the air or the car was only so much melodramatic scribbling. Regardless, I brought a journal on this trip to LA, and for the first time in many years, I wrote as the jet cut across the sky.

I realized as I wrote that I have spent years waiting for my life to start, as though there would be some magical age or event or accumulation of events that would mark my point of entry into the "real" world. So much time spent waiting, not acting, not realizing my own agency. I stumbled across the following in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King: "..time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively... We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

It's the most empowering thing I can imagine. All too often, I tend to wait for time to do something, when that isn't even possible. Changes only occur because they are effected by us; things only happen with humans, not with time. And while I thought that this might cause me to panic, feeling that there isn't enough time to do the things I want, it has instead made me feel that there is so much more space and time for everything I have to offer. Effectively, I feel that I am in control of time, because I can choose how to spend it.