In Praise Of Stopping The Clock

I spent a good fifteen minutes clicking around TV Tropes yesterday in an effort to find a list of shows that have employed the device of having the rest of the cast freeze while one character addresses the audience. I could swear there are shows other than Saved By the Bell that have used this trick, but maybe I’m getting it confused with general breaking of the fourth wall.

Photo by espresso marco

In any case, I was thinking about how damn useful such an ability would be in the real world. Because, as it stands, there’s precious little breathing room to go around for most of us these days. There’s the frying pan and the fire and it isn’t a even a hop, skip and a jump between the two. One job, relationship, decision to the next.  Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Taking a timeout to assess the landscape, figure out where you are and where you want to go is a luxury most of us have decided we don’t have room for. Sure, pulling over to the side of the road to read the map might be helpful, but it would also cost us precious seconds out of the unspecified break-neck journey we’ve apparently all decided we’re on.

It’s not that we aren’t constantly preoccupied with analyzing our lives, because, as a generation, that’s more or less our thing,  it’s just that we can’t seem to gain any emotional or intellectual distance in order to view our past choices and future options with something approaching objectivity (or really, most of us would just settle for evaluating them through a slightly less panicked lens). It’s the equivalent of planning battle strategy while you’re actually in the foxhole – It might prevent you from getting your head shot off in the short-term, but it’s really no way to win a war.

So, what’s behind our inability to catch our breath? Maybe it’s a function of our inflated sense of self-importance/preservation, i.e., if we take a breather, everything will fall apart. We’re needed, we’re valued, our contribution counts. Things would grind to a halt if we weren’t giving our 110% 24/7. And the pay-off?  Well, who can put a price tag on such validation?

Or maybe it’s the fear of finding out exactly the opposite. That things will continue on without us. There are more where we came from and if we slow down, get distracted, take our eyes off the prize, there’s someone right there to take our place and capitalize on our past efforts. If we hit the pause button, we’re the only ones who will be frozen, the rest of the world will rush on by and we’ll be left behind.

So, we keep pinballing through our days. We tell ourselves that we’ll get around to thinking about the big picture and really figuring everything out later – after this killer deadline, in a couple of months when things calm down, as soon as I’m debt-free, definitely before I hit the big 3-0, give it a year or two, still plenty of time to worry about settling down and starting a family, there’s at least another three decades until retirement.

Guess what, folks? The magical time that you’re waiting for is never coming. There will never be a “right” time to freeze the action, clear your head and/or take (baby) steps to be happier. There will never be a point of having “made it” to a great enough degree that you will then feel sufficiently secure to give yourself permission to finally address all of the other things you let slide (i.e., friendships, relationships, travel, learning for pleasure, etc.) while you were making it. There’s the now and the never, with only the futile hopes that are the someday or the eventually or the soon between them.

And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that there’s no real-life rewind button either.