At times I feel like Henry Bemis.
For those younger than me who didn't grow up watching TV shows much much older than them, Henry Bemis is a character from a 1959 Twilight Zone episode called Time Enough at Last. Henry is a coke bottle glassed bookworm who spends so much time with his nose in books that it affects his performance at his job and drives those around him, non readers, nuts. His wife plays a cruel prank on him and asks him to read from a book of poetry, only to find out when he opens the pages she has meticulously scrawled out every word in the book, making it impossible to read. She then destroys the book in front of him.
The next day Henry takes his lunch in the vault of the bank he works at, which offers him solitude and quiet, allowing him to read in peace. Just as he settles in a hydrogen bomb explodes and wipes out all life around him, but he was miraculously saved by being in the bank vault at the right time. At first distraught that all life as he knew it was gone forever, Henry decides to end his life. Before he can do the deed though he realizes that the public library and its contents survived the blast, and now he finally has all the time in the world to read as much as he wants without anyone nagging him about his reading habits. In a wild exuberance, Henry begins collecting books from the shelves before he stumbles on some rubble, which knocks his glasses from his face. The glasses break and Henry, who is unable to see, much less read without his glasses, weeps as the camera pulls away and the story ends.
"That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now."
I never set many goals for my life. When I was 13 I imagined my life at 40, alone, with nothing but a TV and a stack of video games with all the time in the world to play them. "Paradise" I would think, "finally enough time to play through all the game I want to with no one to talk down to me about all the time I devote to video games." While that may not seem all that aspirational it was all I really had.
Three months away from 40 I can say I have achieved my goal and much more. I have a room to myself filled with enough equipment to play just about every video game made in the history of video games, and a library of tens of thousands of games. I could play video games from morning to night every day until I was 100 and not begin to approach the totality of all games that have been and will be. I have two very loving and supportive partners who can afford me the time and money to devout to my obsession.
But here I am spending most of my days not obsessively playing games. Sure I could give myself some more time if I didn't obsessively read and post online so much, and if I really ignored my duties as a member of my family and household, I could carve out a few more hours a day. And truth be told I probably get to spend a lot more time on games that most, so I should feel lucky about where I am at all.
Yet like Henry, I find myself upset that there just isn't enough time in the day, that there are too many other, more important tasks and distractions. And when I do have the time and energy to devout to games, I'm constantly stricken by choice paralysis. "I should wait to play Policenauts until after I've played Snatcher. But there's also that save game of the fan retranslation of Final Fantasy VII I should play through before Final Fantasy VII Rebirth comes out. But I also got all those cool games on the steam sale, and I want to write a game of the year list but I should play more games that came out this year to really round out my opinions. And really, when I think about it, I should be spending time learning Japanese so I can play the other half of my library and really appreciate those games as they were meant to be." And so on and so forth.
And on top of all that, I find myself wanting in time to experience other forms of art like music, movies, animation, and comics. There is so much art in this world that even if I were to live to be over one hundred years old and devout my entire existence to consuming art, I would only touch the smallest fraction of a fraction of all art in existence right now, let alone the art that is being created today and in the future.
When you get older you begin to wrestle with your own mortality. You begin to examine to choices and events that led you to where you are today, and where it likely is to leave you in the future. You can become bitter about the past, and spend the rest of your days wishing that you could go back and change things, wishing that you could have appreciated where you were more than you did, before it's too late. The time wrestling with the past robs you of your time in the present.
Life is a constant dance between making time for what you want and taking time away to deal with what you have to. Few humans can truly say they had enough time to do all they wanted. You can fight your way to a place where you have enough time, only for a personal tragedy to render the time useless to you.
I have the time now. I should be taking advantage of the time I have, before a personal tragedy breaks my ability to enjoy it.
"The best-laid plans of mice and men...and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone."
