What Are Your Plans This Autumn? Thoughts About Time

Translation: Victoria Bakshina

Summer is around the corner, and there is so much to look forward to. I am personally most excited about lying in the kiddie pool at Sundhöllin and collecting freckles. I’m looking forward to traveling around the country with my friends, drinking beer in the sun at Austurvöllur, and sleeping a lot. Not to mention the fact that I am also graduating from my bachelor’s program. That will probably be fun too. I am not worried that the day of graduation will fail me in those matters, but after the graduation things will be different. Most students are familiar with the anxiety that comes with graduating from university. The question: “What are you going to do this autumn?” is as annoying as a hundred midges’ bites while camping. It’s like people can’t think of anything better to celebrate a big milestone than encouraging you to think about the next one, and the next one after that. Every time the question arises, we have to face the future, whether we’ve planned for it or not. I feel lucky to have an answer to this question. I’ll start my MA studies this autumn, and I am excited about it. So it’s okay to wonder: why am I writing this article if I have nothing to worry about? To that I answer: I always find something to worry about.

While celebrating this milestone in my life, I have been thinking a lot about time. It is definitely relative. However, I will not discuss the physical properties of time in this article, since I am not qualified. However, it is interesting to think about the relativity of time in relation to our understanding of it as human beings. We, humanity, are incredibly flawed. We want to see patterns everywhere, we do not understand the random coincidences of the world, instead we tend to assign some meaning to them. Time is a prime example of this; we have created a huge framework around it. Seconds, minutes, weeks, years, childhood, adulthood, old age - these are all terms that are supposed to mean something in accordance with our decision. Then, certain things have to happen every hour. All according to plan, preferably. A bit of a shift here and there, so what, but if you tick all the boxes at a reasonable time, you're in for a good deal! Right? It can all be extremely convincing, and suddenly we have a spouse, and a student loan, and a degree, and a second degree, and children, and a job, and five weeks of summer vacation, and a spot at a kindergarten, and a promotion, and an apartment, and then a house in an ideal location, and cross-country skis, and a trip to Tenerife this summer, and property, and debts, and pensions, and so on, and on. What is life other than an endless checklist of wishes to fulfill? At least this seems applicable when time is imprisoned in the formula that is on display in front of most of us. I don’t know about you, but I get a terrible sense of confinement when my life is narrowed down to one short list. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, obviously. You could say that I’ve been in a kind of existential crisis for the past few weeks, the famous quarter-life crisis. But I think I’ve come out on the other side. The more circles I went, the clearer it became that I can do very little about what other people and society think about time. This formula exists and I can’t change it. However, I can ignore it. Because if I know something after three years of studying at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, it is that nothing we think is true, is actually true. I am not going to change society’s ideas about how time should pass, but I can decide for myself how I want to spend my time. I’ll do this by not worrying too much about the years ahead of me. I truly have little control over the future, it’ll come when it comes. That’s why I try to ignore it as much as possible, let it approach me like a mountain range in the distance while I admire the ground under my feet. The mountains are not going anywhere. In the meantime, I’ll go swimming and drink beer with my friends, sleep and drive around the country without looking at my watch.