20 Minute Lifetime

After reading several blogs on my classmates personal experiences or ideas on the 20 minute lifetime I have come to the conclusion that many of the deal with dark subject matter.

I have not experienced the 20 minute lifetime myself, or at least I don’t remember it which means it probably passed me by without my notice, but in reading others blogs I noticed that most experiences surrounded a tragedy. Most notably, and the one I have heard most frequently was the car crash.

I have heard many people say “I saw my life flash before my eyes,” and what does that mean really and truly. Having never experienced anything like a car crash I was never sure, but after hearing about the 20 minute lifetime perhaps I can make a jab at it.

People often in traumatic situations experience a moment when all that is around them seems to go into a slow motion sequence, and a moment can seem like an eternity. They speak of seeing scenes from their life, or their entire life, flash before their eyes. Recalling whole scenes from their childhood and beyond. Perhaps even things they believe they didn’t even remember.

But this instance is a reliving of their lives all over again, and not a different life they are unfamiliar with, but their present and past. You never hear really of people coming out of an accident saying “I experienced another life” it is always “MY life flashed before my eyes.”

Perhaps this is an event that not really let’s us experience a completely new lifetime in a moment, but is reminding us of what there is left to be had in the life we are in. A kind of déjà vu that wakes us up to our reality. That may be why when people experience such an event their lives are changed forever. They are not waiting for life to begin because it already has. It is 20 minutes of OUR lifetime and not another that we will experience at a different time.

We may all be caught in the myth of the eternal return, experiencing our lives again and again and seeing them for the first time. But it is the realization of the time and life we are in that is important to what we make of our lives to come.