“Time doesn’t exist. You have all the time in the world.”

While writing another essay to apply for A24, my favorite production company of all my favorite films, ready to disregard all self-respect for myself, to beg, crawl, and kiss the boots of the new gods of the industry who could do no wrong in my eyes - the demon that always possesses me takes my heart in their hands and begins to whisper in my ears.

The clock begins to tick with no sound. I am once again a slave to an invisible force with reckless abandon to destroy me.

My anxiety. 

Only this time, I tell myself the new mantra I invoke from the depths of my mind.

“Time doesn’t exist. You have all the time in the world.” 

Suddenly my shoulders drop, the hand playing with my heart finally lets go, the fog of my brain clears out, the voices that ping pong my fears back and forth of my mind finally stops serving blows. 

There is silence. There is peace. And I had to stop before I began typing my essay. Is this how everyone feels? Could I have felt like this all the time? What did time have to do with my anxiety?

I spent most of my life analyzing the world around me in my head. Analyzing myself, critiquing myself and my artwork, judging others for their actions, even when it comes to writing - I’d rather be in my head, fearing the blank white expanse of a page. The possibilities are endless. I would constantly stop myself before starting, fearing the first sentence. Fearing the words I put down on the page was wrong – a waste of time, I retreated to my brain.

For some reason, I found safety there. Security there. But in the same place, I found a sense of security, a sense of invincibility; I was the most vulnerable. I lived here in the void of my consciousness, often without a roadmap or a script to follow.

Every interaction I had with others and the world around me felt like I was dodging missiles and subduing my thoughts. I was constantly listening and perceiving the world within my preconceived notions of right and wrong, how people should live, breathe, work, sleep. The expectation so high of others I failed to see how they were crippling me from living my own life. I created my own hell and never felt safe enough to take any risks.  

The notion of time can be viewed as a measure of life, a sequence of events, as limited, precious, a void needing to be filled, money, a reflection of age, a reminder that we die. Time serves to keep us on track, to help us meet at the same place at the same time. Tracking time helps us manage time (or so they say). And this tracking of time allows us to negotiate with others, ourselves, and our worth to receive monetary rewards.

The awareness of time, more specifically, the understanding that time passes, will continue to pass and will always pass despite anything we do, including our agency, our wants, and desires. And as time passes, specific wants, desires, needs, and expectations begin to fade away, become rarer, disappear, and harder to maintain. We are older, possibly responsible for raising kids, caring for our parents and elders; maybe we settle down for stability and choose that career that guarantees us financial security rather than personal fulfillment.

So, we worry immensely about how we use our limited time. We worry about if we are depleting time the right way, if we are following our purpose, about how to find our purpose, about how to achieve happiness, how to secure happiness in the future, if we believe the present is not good enough. Suppose we have it; we worry about maintaining that sense of joy for as long as possible. 

And when worrying about how we use the time and space on earth to fulfill our every need and wants - time escapes us. Because most of this time is spent worrying. Stressing about made-up notions of the right or wrong way to live life, stressing about what we think would make us happy, stressing out about what others will think of us, stressing about how we compare to others, stressing about what to do with our time, how to make more time as the inevitable, our death, creeps closer. When truthfully, we can do anything we want. To worry about what we don’t have - we can never fully recognize and appreciate what we do have. So much time spent believing we live in scarcity of something, we won’t have the time to go after what we want.

The time spent thinking about what something should be doesn’t give us the space, chance, time to try something new, to be creative, to do what we want at that moment to make us happy. Worrying about a time that does not exist and a time that cannot be changed is the only proper way you can waste your life. Everything else is an experience to help us grow. Whether you fail, make a mistake - these are all experiments you and I conduct. To find the best way/method to actualize whatever we want in this existence, on this vacation on Earth. 

But the only way you can be/live this way is to forget about the past, everything before this present moment, and detach yourself from everything you expect from the future because nothing is guaranteed. We cannot predict nor control the future, so why worry about what if? What if we just enjoyed now? Because there is only now. The past is far gone, and the future has yet to come.

Rushing towards an unknown future could mean rushing towards disaster. Impatience is worrying instead of living. Once the future comes, the past is over. The present, the now, is temporary and deserves appreciation. What will you never get back in this moment? What and who can be gone in a flash you have not expressed gratitude towards?

Where in the present can I find joy?

When I acknowledge that time does not exist and adopt the belief I have all the time in the world, suddenly, I am no longer afraid of running out of it. Because time never runs out. We’re just in the habit of spending it up doing what we don’t want to do. We spend it in our heads. 

Relinquishing my control of time, I can finally allow myself to just be and therefore try without fear of failure because we will all fail. It’s how we learn to succeed. Every attempt at a goal becomes a step closer to what we truly desire. But we must keep attempting, trying, putting pen to a blank page. Only then can I get better.

Stepping outside of my head, letting go of fearing the unknown to live in the world around me, I can sense the infinite time I have in this life. I can be at peace knowing that any action I take will always be of service to me. 

You Can’t Hook a Leviathan, The Leviathan Hooks You

Leviathan (2014) is not for the faint of heart. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev reminds his audience of the brutal reality of living in modern-day Russia in this slow burn, an allegorical story based on the biblical tale of Job. Set in a coastal Russian town, one man, Kolya, tries to keep the land his family has owned for multiple generations from the prying hands of a local mayor. What follows the premise is a series of unfortunate events that plague Kolya’s life, paralleling Job’s life. Zvyagintsev’s tragic tale of man versus government leads us down a rabbit hole of undeniable and devastating irrevocable truths of the formidable and unrelenting “leviathan” that is Russia’s government. Directed with searing imagery of false camaraderie, desolate landscapes, and isolative vignettes of people alienated in their own homes, Leviathan is a cautionary tale reflecting our greatest fears about our agency within the world.

The story for Leviathan is a true story but from a place closer to home than Mother Russia. Andre Zvyagintsev bases his inspiration on the rebellious actions of a man named Marvin Heemeyer, an American mechanic from Colorado who refused to pay fines from his local government. Unlike the protagonist of Leviathan, he decided to take active revenge by bulldozing and destroying public property, including his mayor's home and town hall, before killing himself. Zvyagintsev adapted this story to contemporary Russian society and reversed the power dynamics to reflect the vulnerable, powerless individual against the predatory state. 

Leviathan does a terribly good job showcasing how one man’s actions to defy his superiors lead him down a dark path without a chance at redemption. Zvyagintsev, himself, is a firm believer that revolution or having a political say is rather pointless and will not change anything in his favor. Only those with political influence and money ever get a platform to be heard and facilitate change. The film’s outcome aligns with his beliefs, which are not forced and unrealistic but painfully representational of the uncertainty of stability, the uncertainty of god’s will, and the uncertainty of whether the choices we make in our lives are ones out of stubbornness or righteousness. 

It will be an understatement if one does not mention the religious undertones Zvyagintsev litters throughout the film. The plot revolves around everyone trying to escape their deteriorating reality, their inescapable fate. Kolya, through appealing the court, his wife through an affair, his son by literally running away, and almost every side character by constantly drinking their miseries away without restraint. Yet all their attempts to escape their fate are for naught—misfortune triumphs against their folly attempts at every turn. At first glance, the film’s plot seems immoral, cruel, and pointless to view unless we look at Job's story, the allegory mentioned in the movie by a conservative-looking priest. Job’s story conveys a tale of a wealthy man losing everything he holds sacred, his family, his flock, and even his health. Everyone around him assumes he must have done something sinful to achieve such misfortune, even he doubts his faith in God for a second. Yet, in reality, God reveals to him, as the Priest does in Leviathan to Kolya, that sometimes wickedness prevails without God’s intervention, and sometimes the good suffers. The film’s ending has an even more sinister religious twist that no one could have seen coming. Still, it yields the film’s most satisfying message about the meaninglessness fight against a “Leviathan.”

With such a dire metaphor for fighting the system, it's a wonder that the film achieved government funding from the Ministry of Culture and mild approval from Russian critics. Zyvangenstev’s film is too good to be ignored or censored. The film did receive backlash from the Ministry afterward, implementing a ban of his films due to its portrayal of defaming images of Russian culture. Regardless, its premiere at Cannes, nomination for Oscars, winning the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 72nd Golden Globes, and many other awards given by the Russian Guild of film critics proves that despite the film’s critical look at Russian society, no one could resist the groundbreaking and talented work of Zvyanginstev and his heartbreaking masterpiece Leviathan. 

Unlike his Russian avant-garde predecessors, who garnered attention for documentary realness with shaky handheld camerawork and long takes seen in films, Brother and 4, Zvyagintsev rarely moves his camera once he’s set it down. InLeviathan, there is more devoted attention to the composition and performance of actors. In most scenes, we watch the tension unfold through dialogue as the characters in the film realize a conflicting turn of events, sitting alone in suffocating silence or conversing on how to sabotage one another. Zvyagintsev isn’t shy to show that his characters fall apart on screen with no additional gimmicks other than the actors playing their complex roles with a meticulous understanding of the stakes of their characters’ actions. Without giving too much away, Kolya and his wife try their best to find happiness in what brings them comfort. For Kolya, it's his family’s home, while for his wife, it’s in another partner. However, leaning too far into what makes them comfortable solidifies their doom.

By the end of this review, you may be wondering why you should watch such a depressing film about the inevitability of failure in a flawed society, a corrupt “Leviathan,” as the film suggests. The film is not a funeral for the lack of agency in Russian society but a testament to its existence instead of ignoring the harsh truth. Kolya is duly tested for his faith in the government and God, which by the end of the film, one could argue, might be interchangeable. But this test of faith exposes that there may be no plan at all, no sinister plot trying to upend everyone’s goals and dreams, but just flawed people in a hierarchical, stratified society. While the director believes his vote is worthless and standing up to the government is pointless, he still decided to share this story because he believed in its importance. Zvyagintsev values the truth over political agency, over failed action, over apathetic vices, as conveyed by many of the characters of his film. While the truth may be ugly, it does challenge the viewer, forcing them to be aware of political power's corrupt and thuggish nature, regardless of politicians’ good or bad intentions. Zvyagintsev portrays a sickening tale of the human condition in contemporary times that doesn’t fall short of its message or its beauty.

Choosing Exploration over Tourism

Before I visit the motherland of my grandmother, I prepare to become nobody, stripping down the core American identity to become one with my Jamaican ancestry.

There are multiple ways to travel, but I believe there are only two types of travelers. The first type will book a five-star hotel in the city plaza, visit museums of stolen and found artifacts, take a guided hike with other travelers like them, eat overpriced cuisine cooked for their western taste buds, and stare at their phones in the moments of stillness between itinerary checkpoints.  I shall call this traveler “the tourist.” The other traveler tends to stay away from big cities and live in hostels and homestays, blend in with the locals, look for the shack in the wall for food, sit down at a café chatting with a stranger, and maybe accept an invitation for an unplanned excursion to someplace unbeknownst to maps. I shall call this traveler “the explorer.” 

I intend to be this type of traveler because the other traveler does not ever leave home. Most big cities now mirror most western cities. The locals will only speak to you in English, and the McDonalds is right down the street from your hotel. Preparing for a month’s extended stay in another country means learning how to live and adapt to their environment, not terraforming an experience to your liking or your ideal fantasy of a place you saw on the Instagram explore page.

To immerse myself in a new culture and live there without handicap, I must strip myself bare. Alternatively, in other words, I must disconnect myself from my home, my perceptions, and my personal belongings. Furthermore, I must do it all alone.

Disconnecting from home means saying goodbye to family and friends, which boils down to Social Media Has To Go. Please be aware; I do not mean to cut all my connections by throwing my phone in the sea so no one can reach or find me. However, there needs to be a degree of separation from my reality and myself; therefore, I can be present and encounter new experiences. Joseph Cambell outlines this separation in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” In his discussion about the Hero’s Journey, he describes a “separation” and a “departure” from what is familiar to a “region of supernatural wonder” to overcome adversity. Later these heroes returned home to share the enlightened knowledge and experience they gained. Some of the heroes he includes are Prometheus from Greek mythology, Guatama Sayakumi of Buddism lore, and Moses of the Old Testament, all left places of comfort with little to no contact to explore untouched wonders undistracted. 

While I do not have to adhere to such strict separation rules, eliminating the distraction of social media is a good starting point. The presence of social media may twist my motivations and experience of travel. Social media persuades users to share and post rather than experience and grow. Social media may also hinder me from making connections in Jamaica as I may become engrossed by what everyone else is doing at home. 

Visiting my grandmother before I leave will help me disconnect from my perceptions and stereotypes I subconsciously hold of Jamaica. While I will not be reporting or necessarily documenting my trip for others, Professor Tracy Dalhby’s traveling guide, “Parachuting In: Tips For the Long Distance Reporter,” is a helpful mindset on how to travel like an “explorer” rather than a “tourist.” Professor Dalhby’s most crucial bullet point, “Do your homework while still at home,” is vital for this step to strip down my identity of my American goggles. While I could spend hours online reading from other Americans, their travel experiences of what to expect and how to be safe, I will just go straight to the source. Through my grandmother, I will learn the customs and societal norms, boundaries of communication, what food to try, how to haggle, where not to go, and whom to reach out to if I find myself stuck.  I will use her perceptions as a springboard to make deep connections and a life jacket if I need one.

Another traveling hack I learned from my last trip abroad is to Leave it Behind. Disconnecting from my belongings is probably my main obstacle, but one with tremendous rewards. I tend to over-pack due to the fear that I will need to solve every obstacle I face independently. However, after reading the article, “What happens when two strangers trust the rides of their lives to the magic of the Universe,” written by Kim Cross, I am reassured that if something goes wrong, the Universe will provide. 

In the article, Cross describes the balanced phenomena of Murphy’s Law and the biblical quote, “Ask, and you shall receive.” For two cyclists backpacking across the country on their bikes, everything that could go wrong for them occurred. Nevertheless, every single time a mishap occurred, the kindness of strangers allowed them to continue their journey despite their bikes breaking down, getting lost, and even sometimes having no food and water. Without the extra checked bag, I can travel within a country with ease. If I need something, I can pick it up there. If I am stranded, I will not be afraid to ask for help. Intentional absence can create space for impromptu connections and small miracles to occur. 

Traveling like an “explorer” rather than a tourist requires a certain amount of courage only the brave possess. An “explorer” is relinquishing themself of their identity and adopting uncertainty for an adventure. When I travel to Jamaica, I will be going as a blank slate. My motivations will not be to update the folks back home constantly, nor would they be to see a new place through the distorted lens of an American. I will be traveling with little on my back, ready for spontaneity, prioritizing experience over fantasy, and exploring over sightseeing.