no way but forward

Being back on campus at UIUC, I figured I would take a stroll through the Met. & Mining Building (now known as the Materials Science and Engineering Building) just for old times. But as I'm walking through the old building and it's empty halls (since school is out of session for the summer) I wonder "what exactly am I expecting here?" I mean really... that I'm going to be magically transported through some fantastical Nostalgia Portal and I will be showered with rose petals as trumpets signal my return?

There's no past. It happened, it's over, those moments will never occur again. There is only forward, in whatever way that may manifest. Somehow along the way I fear that I have come to expect that I can pause/rewind/fast forward/skip along time like some sort of cosmic TiVO and that I can do everything. Maybe that's why I'm always late to things - I expect to be able to pause the rest of the world while I do just one more thing "it'll jus take a second, really, I swear". And just because I can imagine or relive a moment in my head doesn't make it happen, and in the meantime, the world has continued to turn while my imagining was in progress. From the book club selection last month (Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore) there's a passage when the Johnnie Walker character is harvesting the souls of the cats Nakata was looking for:

" 'You have to look!' Johnnie Walker commaded. '... Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact things will be even worse the next time your eyes open. ... Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.' "