Then, one morning, you wake up, and it’s no longer like that, or almost. Personally, I’m still in a bit of a gray area: I’m not financially independent yet, but I live on my own. I don’t have the responsibilities of a full adult, but I do have responsibilities. I’m neither fish nor fowl, yet I’m terrified as if I were both. Right now, I’m booking this summer’s vacation with my mom, and I’m realizing something with a lot of sadness: I just want to go, plain and simple. She wants to go for my sake, because she’s thinking about when I’ll be older and won’t go with her anymore, because we didn’t go last year, and so on… At the same time, the “me” from a few years ago would have wanted to go because people expect you to go on vacation… and during your teenage years, everything is pretty much a competition, including going on vacation. And as short-lived as that phase was for me, it did happen. But why do we act this way? Why do we do things for others and stress ourselves out over things that we intrinsically want to do, but most of all, that we feel we have to do?

Adults go to the gym mainly for two reasons (with exceptions, obviously): because they can’t accept getting older and try to stay in the best shape possible for as long as they can, and because they need an outlet, some “me time”—in short, to unplug from everything for a few hours. My question is: are we all destined to end up living a life that practically stresses us out, a life from which we need a break at least three times a week for a couple of hours? Because honestly, I’m afraid of that happening to me, yet at the same time, I’m following every single step to make this scenario my future reality.

While writing this, I wondered if it was just a matter of money: you don’t have enough money to buy what you want, to go where you want, to have the house you want, so you stress out and, like a hamster on a wheel, you go through your routine endlessly, hoping something will change.

But looking around and talking to people, I’ve realized that maybe the issue goes a bit deeper than that. Maybe we’ve built a society so complex and intricate that it no longer reflects the fundamental simplicity of human nature. And so, like hamsters, we look for the wheel we like best, we climb on, and we start running and running to keep it spinning—hoping it will take us back to when we were kids, or if that’s not possible, at least somewhere far away from here. If not with our bodies, then at least in our minds.

There are moments from the past that we barely remember, and others that, instead, we just cannot seem to let go of.

Moments in our everyday present that wash over us like a cold shower, and others that, conversely, we linger in, like a warm bath with scented candles on a rainy day.

Of course, not every situation, experience, or moment carries the same weight, but sometimes the reason why is not clear at first glance. Like when we are little, and our mind singles out specific moments that, like indelible images, stick in our minds… on what basis does this selection happen? One of the most vivid memories I have dates back to when I was three years old. I was on vacation with my parents and, from one of those random toy dispensers you used to find on the street at the seaside, they got me a Hello Kitty keychain. It was definitely not a groundbreaking or significant moment in my life; yet, I can’t get it out of my head. What could that be down to? I just can’t wrap my head around it. In my junior year of high school, I went through a really difficult time, and the paradox is that my mind has blocked out almost every memory of that year; I only keep a few fleeting images of what happened. And yet, a part of me has never moved on, and sometimes I find myself rethinking or even dreaming about that period in the vain hope of grasping new pieces of information, as if for an entire year I had been an outside spectator to my own life. It fascinates and unnerves me how little control, deep down, we have over our minds and how little this situation can be improved.

Perhaps these three macro-groups—past, present, and future—are a bit reductive compared to the complexity of life. Time exists and flows because we decided it was necessary to measure it, and of course, this has greatly benefited everyday communal living, but sometimes it is necessary to look a bit beyond what we are used to seeing. Life flows inexorably before our eyes—πάντα ῥεῖ, as Heraclitus used to say—but everything remains interconnected. And sometimes, no matter how much we would like to leave the past behind, it is simply not possible, because it is intrinsically linked to our present right now. In fact, it is our very present, just younger by some time, from which, just as we could not escape before, we cannot escape now either.