Instantaneous

“What is an instant death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air or blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is an instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.” –John Green Looking for Alaska

                So many things in this world we describe as “instant”. It never is though, is it? An epi-pen is suppose to instantly take away an allergic reaction but believe me it doesn’t work like that one bit. Our world is so fast paced that I think we crave instantaneous things. Whatever works fast, whatever won’t hold us up, is what we want. But we’re moving faster than the world itself and it can’t keep up. We want instant but the world is taking its own sweet time and begging us to slow down and experience moments. And I know we will never be able to enjoy the feeling of a car crash or an allergic reaction, we want those things to be instantly gone but you can’t slow down the good and speed up the bad, you have to have both at the same speed. However, waiting for instantaneous medicine to kick in is particularly humbling. Ultimately, I think we need to slow down; the only things that happen in an instant are the good stuff, the stuff that we’re moving too fast to take notice of. Other than that, instantaneous doesn’t exist: it’s a lie that we like to hear so that we can rest assured our daily lives can remain at high speed. But it shouldn’t exist either. We shouldn’t want the world to move as fast as we do – we’re only here once. Every moment that passes is another one that will never return. We want instant so bad as if we’re in a race and that’s the only thing that will speed us up, but what are we racing towards? Death? We should not want instant to exist – it’s too fast.