Passing of Time

4 minute-read • 685 words

As long as there is love, there will be grief.

And so long as there is life, there will be death.

These are two constants that you and I know without having to agree upon. Death gives life purpose – without it, life would just be eternal existence. What meaning would it have to anyone?

I’m soon to enter my final, 4th year in university. I look over my shoulder at the 3 years I’ve spent here, and grin at what has been the craziest roller coaster that I could not ever come up with, even in my wildest dreams. The first year I had a taste of “the uni experience” for the first time. I spent the whole of my second year doing hackathons and competitions. This year I got to participate in an exchange program to Singapore. I brush the dust off my journal from high school, and upon reading it I realize how far I’ve come from that naïve 16-year-old with child-like wonder, dreams, and the same time no self-esteem.

Through all this, I wonder how much I have to attribute or give credit to “the uni experience”. Because as much as I love everything that this has been, I don’t think it would be possible to live like this for your whole life. People talk about how the four years will pass so quickly, yet I have to wonder how much less concentrated I would be if I knew I had to keep up this effort and perform for five years or more.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law is the adage that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.

If I had been given five hundred years fifteen years to complete college, I am certain I would not have gone through these years with the same vigor and hunger that I did in my quest to grow and become better. I am certain my academic and social environment would have been much more lackluster in inspiring me to keep going, because everyone including myself would be in no rush to complete or accomplish anything. You can always do it later.

Maybe it is a good thing that not everyone is a life-long learner, in the sense that not everyone has committed their entire lives to becoming a student in a structured learning environment. Hot take, maybe? The main reason being that you can always learn in a non-structured manner, from other resources or directly from people.

I think that it is a good thing that college lasts for at most 4-5 years, because this having this concentrated period dedicated to just studying has opened up so many opportunities for people to band together, whether it’s to excel and give your 110% in a class or a competition, or just for the sake of having fun and making memories. The reason I emphasize the “concentrated period” is because, assuming Parkinson’s Law, having a much longer college experience means everyone be much more scattered and less united.

Generalizing that same logic, maybe it’s a good time we don’t live for hundreds of years or more. I imagine a future civilization that has made advancements in medicine to allow people to live for over 200 years – I think the first sign of their downfall would not begin at some inter-galactic war, or mutually assured destruction through nukes, but it might come earlier when people stopped valuing life for what it is.

Now what?

I’ve still got a year left over here (before I graduate). A year possibly full of dilemmas, because while my last year will be the most crucial in determining the path of my career, it’s also the last slice of the pizza; the bottom of the milk; the last evening of a week-long vacation. When you know it’s about to end, so you take your time to cherish and enjoy it to the best of your ability.

But that’s just life – there’s more to come, of course. When one door closes, another opens.