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The One About Grasping Time

The world moves forward, but not all of us move forward with it.

Araci Matos
6 min readJan 1, 2023
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

I realized that I was no longer grasping time when I was twenty years old, an age still young, but that nevertheless made me feel my first hindrance in being able to keep up with the world.

It happened after I had been living in a remote part of Brazil for almost seven months, and at a time when although the internet existed, it was only accessible from a computer, making the world even more distant.

When I returned to Portugal after one of the most extraordinary adventures of my life, those seven months had been a time capsule for me. So it is as if I had suddenly traveled into the future, unaware that the world had continued to turn and that the people I had left behind had, like me, moved on with their lives.

But here’s my point.

In that late summer of 2010, there were two things that everyone seemed to be talking about and that nobody in Brazil knew about.

The first one was Lady Gaga.

It was the first time I heard her name. In the space of a little more than half a year, this singer seemed to have been known to everyone for decades, even though I had been gone for half a year.

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Araci Matos
Araci Matos

Written by Araci Matos

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