The Corner of Time

Are you familiar with The Corner of Time? No, not the one that you might come across in a VSauce video.

It is a corner in your room. My room. Our rooms.

I call it the Corner of Time.

It’s not tough to find it. It’s probably within your field of view right now. It’s the one that sits nestled beneath a sheath of dust. Where did this dust come from? Well, some scientists say half of it is your own dead skin. So, in a way, a layer of you blankets this corner. If you look closely you can see the individual specks — laid out perfectly random yet perfectly uniform.

Different homes have different manifestations of this corner — it can be an elegant polished dark wood mahogany table, a frugal plastic three-legged stool, a rack with shelves resting one on top of another, or perhaps even a bare cold floor.

You don’t spare it much thought. It is a polite corner, you know what I mean? It isn’t one to make itself seen very often. Unlike the bedside corner table with its tangle of charging wires and mug stains from the times you didn’t use a coaster. Or the kitchen corner with the stack of dirty dishes that shriek for your attention and intervention. The Corner of Time is rather poised and understated, waiting for you to rediscover it, at your own pace, all in good time.

It is rather accommodating though. Somehow, within its tiny footprint, it holds fragments of your life that you believed were inseparable, but time thought otherwise. Of course, it isn’t the same for you and me. Mine is a 2-foot-high wooden cabinet that stores a pile of books. Books that were bought to inspire, enchant, and enlighten — all read up to pages 30–130, or as my bibliophilic alter-ego calls it, The Page of No Return. It is that lull point in a story where a book once dropped leaves no incentive for the reader to return. Think of the descriptions of rural Kerala in The God of Small Things. Or all of The Alchemist.

On top of this cabinet-esque Corner of Time lives a sunburst Fender Electric Guitar which Amazon called “Easy to learn for beginners” but rather adroitly didn’t mention “when provided enough time and attention”. I am a maestro of chords G, D, E & A minor and a tasteful EP of 5 watered-down song choruses that make use of these, and nothing more. It is a remnant of a time when, if YouTube were a person, he would have thought, man, this is the passion for music that’s missing in today’s generation of wannabe musicians. For 3 months, the guitar cried & twanged as I plucked its steel strings while they bit into my fingers, turning them pink from perseverance. Each day began with a new technique: tapping, slide, finger-picking, barre, vibrato, staccato. And then, one day, it stopped. Without reason. Staccato.

The corner has even spread its roots to the wall above it — hanging from a peg on the wall sits a solitary dusty medal from a 10K marathon ran two years ago. Seers had exalted its arrival as an omen — a harbinger of fitness & physique. Two adjacent pegs were left untouched as receptacles for the half and the full marathon medals as and when they cometh. The pegs still wait with heads held high, turned upwards in pride, seeking their rightful heir.

Does your Corner of Time look something like this? A lot like this? Completely different?

If a therapist is someone who documents your thoughts, The Corner of Time documents your priorities. It is a curation of artifacts that you held close to your heart until your heart switched lanes. Phases come and phases go, and while going, they leave behind little fossils encased in dusty amber. These dusty fossils remind you of times gone by, in case you wish to ever return.

And every once in a while, you do return. Typically, it’s at a stage when you are losing control of your life’s new core priorities. Work’s not fulfilling you anymore, the people around you aren’t behaving like you wish they did, and the things you thought you had all figured out seem more convoluted than ever. You are sitting in the driver’s seat and even have the steering wheel gripped tight, but turning it elicits no response from the car.

And in these moments when you feel powerless, you whip out the trusty dusting cloth, wipe clean these dusty fossils, and give life a second chance. A renewed vigor, a more disciplined cadence, a dedicated hour of the day — you give it all. Sometimes, you can turn back time, salvage your priorities, reprioritize them, and, if lucky, pick up from where you left off. More often than not, it’s a bit too late, and the dust starts kicking in faster than you can wipe.

And you realize that, for the most part, The Corner of Time is but a purgatory. A purgatory where things rest before being shelved out of sight in a dark, opaque almirah, where your eyes can’t see them anymore, giving your conscience a breather. While leaving, they leave in their wake a clean, dust-free outline of themselves, which you, of course, wipe clean whilst silently seeking forgiveness.