The suffocating time that has passed

It's all the fault of a record player.

But it could be from a radio station, an old movie, or even a DJ at a party.

The fact is that the record player that arrived at my house made me rediscover old vinyl records, vinyl records from my childhood.

Vinyl records from my adolescence, from my life. I was rediscovering memories; while compulsively separating the ones I liked the most and playing them throughout the sunny Saturday when I should have been at the beach.

Suddenly I came across the LP of the soundtrack to the cult movie Blade Runner, which deeply affected me when I first watched it, at the height of my teenage years filled with existential questions.

The greatest of all human anxieties – the fear of death and the unpredictability of life – was beautifully synthesized there, especially at the end of the film, when Rick (Harrison Ford) says he doesn't know how long Rachel, the replicant he fell in love with, will live, and concludes with the question: "and who knows?"

That scene shaped my next few days, philosophically speaking, and the Blade Runner soundtrack played on the day I, still in my late teens, decided to get married.

And getting emotional listening to it on my record player has nothing to do with wanting those days back.

The songs on the album are about remembering loved ones from that time who are no longer alive.

They relate to the core of the whole issue that haunts us - we have a life path and we are inexorably heading towards the end.

Listening to my wedding soundtrack, far from making me relive that scene, reminds me that time is the only thing I know from my dictionary that cannot be recovered.

Theoretically, we recover health, money, self-esteem, and knowledge. We recover memory. But not time. Just like death, the passage of time doesn't let us forget that there is an end and that the finiteness of life is the great sword hanging over our heads.
To dwell on the feeling of time that we have already lived and that we cannot recover is to make the air unbreathable.

When we realize that time is irreversible and its passage leads us to the end, we lose oxygen for at least a few seconds.

There's nothing to be done but drink it to the last drop. If it's meant to pass, let it pass leaving us with the chance to achieve things for ourselves. Time leads us to the end, but it's while it passes that we have the chance to be our best and leave our mark on our family, among friends, in our society, and even for Humanity. It only depends on us.