“कालः सर्वं विरोपयति।” Time Heals Everything.

If we approached life with this idea, if we believed in time, its healing power and its immense dominance over all other forms of Metaphysical qualities—would it make it easier for us to face obstacles now?

No matter how hurt you are, time heals everything. No matter what happens, time heals everything. Time won’t let it hurt forever, time won’t let the wound be fresh forever. Time’s duty is to pass, time passes, and so does everything that comes along with it.

I’ve a thing or two for art that focuses on this theme, all artworks, films, songs, prose, everything.

I wrote a book about time personified. Just to see how time’s healing qualities actually work. Just to see it for myself.

Time Heals Everything

A Sanskrit shloka says, “कालः सर्वं विरोपयति। kālah sarvam viropyati”. Somehow, when I think about it, it turns out that nothing else matters. Time is endless, eternal, so mysterious. Time isn’t linear. Time is the best medicine we have.

Everything is happening all at once, you see.

The universe you’re hurt in is the same universe you’ll heal in. This is here. Everything’s here. At this place, just at different times.

So what do we mean by time? It’s not as much a thing in itself as it is just something by which we measure our life. Is today the same as yesterday? What’s different about the two? What’s any different about tomorrow except that you’ll be older and probably on your way already to healing? The sun rises the same way everyday and there’s nothing new under the sun either.

So, what’s time? Just something that passes. Just something that ends up healing you somewhere in the middle of the passing.

I first came across this when I was fifteen years old. It has stuck through the years. It’s bitter, this shloka. It’s bittersweet, a little nostalgic (as you’re remembering everything that happened that you need healing from, and in hindsight, the trials and tribulations were their own catharsis).

That’s why, the one theme, the one leitmotif I’ve employed in my novel is that time heals everything. And that works for me, and works for the storyline, because the protagonist is a man aged 79. This lends the book its title: 79.

What’s painful for him is that a young man in his house—a stranger who has suddenly appeared in there with no preamble—tells our protagonist that he is Time. Along with that he brings about a rude premonition—our old guy is going to die within 12 days. What does that do to one who’s already so old and withered, dangling at the edge of mania after memories of his lost wife, one who’s so lonely and desolate in a big house? What does that do to one when their eighteenth birthday is only 12 days away? What will come first? The birthday cake or the hearse? How will time even be able to heal all the wounds when there are so many that are smarting?

Does Time Heal Or Do We Just Forget?

Sometimes it becomes very hard to find the difference between healing and simply forgetting all the pain until it has dulled its sharp edges into what we fondly call nostalgia. So what is it really? Do we actually heal or do we simply forget all the pain? Do we just wait and let time pass until everything fades into distant memory?

But that cannot be what healing is. Healing is supposed to be more significant that that. Right? It is supposed to fill the void, not just ignore it until the absence stops glaring angrily at the world.

The thing about time is that it passes and it necessarily forces us to forget things, no matter how hard we try to hold on to them. Memory fails, again and again and again, and what remains is often not accurate. What is left behind is too vivid, too vague and too colored by our own emotions and expectations and perceptions. We remember often not what was but how it felt. And so time warps every moment into something that looks a lot like a diary entry, journaled into yellowed paper and full of personal suggestions and opinions.

Is this what healing is? The forgetting of everything else except what remains as a shadow of how you think it was?

The Beauty Of Remembering

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
-Antonio Porchia

Remembering the past is what makes this life something. It is our souvenir. Like old photos and old letters and old people who look different but laugh the same way, it reminds us that even in this ever-changing world, there are some things that remain. It is painful, yes, but what would be more painful would be never remembering at all, because that would be just empty.

The thing about forgetting is that we also get to remember. And though the memories might be painful sometimes, most other times they mean the world to us.

79: An Ode To Memory

79 is as much about staying the same as it is about growing up and growing old, in some ways. Rom is a person with a changing body and a changing mind and a changing world around him. His kids are independent adults, his grand kids are growing up, his friends are changing just as he is. And yet there is something that remains unchanged. His memory, though it will fade, will still hold everything he experienced like a flower held safe in the pages of a book.

Memory is what life ultimately boils down to and we hold on to it like a child with a balloon soaring ever upwards. We want it to carry us up and let us fly.

Memory is the most beautiful aspect of time passing. It is a proof that cannot be shown, cannot be made into something hard and solid, but it is proof nonetheless. It is proof of having lived a life, having laughed and cried and loved.

All I am is my memory. All my life is stored there. And though it may be vague and full of gaps and plot holes, it is mine to cherish.

It is perhaps memory which saves us in the end. It is this that heals us. Time passes and passes mercilessly, but maybe it leaves behind this for our taking.

It may be that this faint imprint that is left behind of our joys and our sorrows, both of which mingle together and become inseparable in our mind, is what lets us heal.

Time doesn’t heal by making us forget everything, all the pain and the grief. Instead it lets us remember. Healing is the holding on to the memory of the pain, intermixed with the joy that made it possible. It is the flower hidden in the pages of a book, lost among countless other flowers and waiting for countless more to come.

Like a painting coming together, or like an illusion becoming clear after it’s been looked at from every angle, memory comes together. The bad days are patched up by the good ones. The hurtful memories get filled in by the ones that we love. Everything eventually makes a whole that still might feel out of place sometimes, but is less painful by the day.

Everyday we make more memories and let the past ones fit in alongside each other a little more naturally and everyday we heal.

This is how time heals.

This is how it makes everything count.

Debut book”79″ will be out next March. Are you waiting to meet Rom too? Get to know the story better in this post: How to Let Go of Resentment? What I Want to Say Through My First Novel. Follow our Pinterest to stay updated and find mood boards and more beautiful stuff about the book.