If I compare my reading level now as compared to years ago when I was still in my teen, it definitely has improved by leaps and bounds. I can comprehend a lot more of the narratives, and connect them to life and what may lie beyond. It soothes me when I thought about this. Traces of time are meaningful only when one progresses mentally and spiritually; else it is just a measurement of space one travels. Space has a magical attribute, certainly of immediate effect as compared to time since as one is removed from a familiar daily space, one will have felt that he has moved on. However I have seen too many a face that space merely transforms itself in the form of creases on their skins, and they age not much mentally since their youth. I guess that's the reason why everyone is always looking back to his youth. That period is a measurable period, as the mind grows in pace with, sometimes even outpace, time.
The line of thought brought me inevitably to the reason why scholars graduate with degree called 'philosophical doctorate'. Philosophy weighs not in the amount of knowledge being accumulated, but in the amount of meaningful traces collected in the process of discovery. Meanings are imprinted on the memory only when one sits down to contemplate the truth and the existence of the mystery one is indulging in solving. As meanings are being fathomed, philosophies take their forms and the footsteps they then leave behind are what we remember as the passage of time.
After all, the sense of time in our memories are the traces left by our mental or spiritual growth. And it makes me sad to think that so many spend a lifetime measured so short in such traces. Maybe that's why so many think that the summit of life has passed after their youths, the times when the bustle of menagerie of emotions and reflections about life are constantly in their minds. Too many have told me that 'high school life' or 'university life' were the best times of their lives, and they wish to experience that period of life once more if they could. I would like to ask the people who make the remark this: "Do you think it's time that has left you behind, and in fact truly it is you who left time unaccounted for?"
