I Choose Which Tapes to Play

The tapes are all here, and it is completely up to me to play them.

I was here when the Y2K bug was being spoken about aggressively in the world of software. In fact, I was one of the three kids performing the skit in the school assembly on a rainy day back in 1999. I have a vivid memory of it. My brother had just started school, and after the assembly, we did a tour of each class to explain what this bug was, why it was existential, and why, if not checked, it would lead to the complete collapse of the system. I remember this because I was the bug in a monkey costume haha. I can relive this memory as if there is a magnetic tape, rolled together, burning this entire morning into it.

June 2nd, 2025 just passed. We are now closer to 2050 than we are to 2000. Time has flown by at speeds that many theorems can explain, but for me, some days have felt longer than others. School felt forever long, and the life after is a blip. But one thing is clear. The tapes are all here, and it is completely up to me to play them.

I was born in the analog world. I saw physical tapes for music, for VCR. So bear with me when I draw this analogy to explain another of the many human conditions I try to articulate. Time has done its thing and passed. But the bodily experience of it has been quite different. The only reason I know that time has passed is because in my physical body, I have what feels like tapes and tapes recorded into memories. Of course, my physical body has aged; it has changed its form. But in a twisted way, these tapes determine which part of the century I feel I am living in and when.

It feels right to write this, but strange to take it out of my head and put it on a page. I feel time moving, and it is not always moving at the same pace. It depends on what tapes I have selected to play.

These tapes, in some way, are just different pre-recorded cassettes where the sequence of events is clear. Unless something fundamentally different happens or something changes, the tapes always flow in the same order. From the beginning to the end, pretending that what’s happening in real time is exactly what’s on the tape that was recorded many, many years ago, sometimes by observation and sometimes by my own creation. And it is here.

There is a tape that plays when I am anticipating a hospital visit. It plays quite vivid but often completely unrelated scenes from a previous time, trying to make sense of what is happening today. This baggage of the analog continues to drive my experience of the present and often wrongfully nudges me into a future that it thinks it already has a tape for from the past.

For my mind, the future is merely a projection of the past. Nothing more. Whenever a tape isn’t capable of showcasing the present, it also goes out of its way to fill the silence, the gap, or the unknown with whatever strange mixtape it can create.

It was very recently that I realised, so long as my mind thinks there is a tape, time collapses and I don’t feel it passing. So long as there is no tape, time expands, almost as if to give me an opportunity to record more and more of it, to create a new tape. This tape also completely dictates how old I feel or where I think I am in the century. In a strange way I can experience an internal time travel.

I have felt like a 9-year-old, scared of being given a red card in school for breaking a rule when I had made a mistake as an adult.

I have felt like a 6-year-old hoping to be consoled after watching or reading a difficult movie where I see death.

I have felt like a 15-year-old, still waiting for a text message from someone that may never come.

I have felt like a 7-year-old, too afraid that I would be locked in class and wouldn’t be able to go home because of some mischief I did.

I have also felt like a 4-year-old, full of unlimited energy and joy when I have seen my friends after a long time or when someone around me told me they felt at home.

I have felt like a powerful 30-year-old Hercules who can handle everything thrown at him, human or divine, when a friend tapped my shoulder and said, “You can do nothing wrong. I am here and I’ve got your back.”

All of these tapes are ready to go. They were all recorded when I didn’t even want them to be recorded. And now, so close to 2050, I am learning that I get to choose which one of these gets played, and more importantly, whether I want to play them.

It was in meditation and then in therapy when I first realised that sometimes, all of these tapes and many more were being played all at once, which is why I could never feel the present. In time, through pockets of silence and checking in with my body, I noticed that there are tapes that are constantly on, and some situations play them loudly more than others. And now, I am also learning that I can rewrite the tapes that don’t serve me anymore.

Not all moments of silence from others are acts of punishment, even though the tape may say so. Sometimes, it is just silence. And I can choose to fill that up with presence and continue to be fully involved with the wonders of life around me. I have the power to do that.

A few months ago, my brother spotted me in a harsh case of a tape playing loudly, so loudly that he had to touch my head and tell me, “It is just a tape. You can pause it, you can stop it, you can change it.” But all of this must be rooted in action. I often thought the solution to getting out of one tape was to replace it with another but keep listening. I am learning now that the solution is stopping it through action and choosing whether I want to put in another tape or simply leave the tape blank so something new and wonderful can be written on it.

I have seen in some moments that I can stay in a place I want to be a little bit longer now. Time stands still for me. In other moments, time feels like it is running so fast that if I don’t pause it, it will break the speed of light and make me so heavy (Einstein’s theory of relativity) that I will become an infinite mass, unable to ever move forward. Between that and knowing I can pause the tape, I am slowly starting to witness the movement of time and what it does to my experience of it passing.

Nature, places of history, movements of kindness, great food, live music, places of worship, meditation, they all give me an opportunity to pause that tape, to even shut it down completely and also slow down time.

Maybe my wish for me and for you is not that we live forever, but that time bends for you in the most interesting ways: that the best days are the slowest, the worst days are the fastest, and you get to choose the tapes you’d like to play.

I’ll leave you with one question:

What tapes are you playing so often that you stop feeling present?

Lots of love,

Rishi