When life gives you a bouquet of time
Scattered petals and the secrets of time travel.
The poet and essayist Ross Gay writes, take your sweet time. Let the universe drop a bouquet of time in your lap.
Time messes with me. Time makes me feel a little antsy, makes me feel guilty, makes me doubt my memory and sanity. I often say that I’m in denial about the length of a minute. I say this to explain myself, typically a few minutes late to show up. My husband knows to meet me places a little later than I say I’m going to be there. I’m not quite on time. While I scramble and rush, my heart-rate rising, I berate myself for not leaving the house a few minutes earlier. I believe I can stretch time and squeeze more from the seconds.
The thing is, I know a minute can stretch. I know it’s not fixed. I feel the way time bends and opens. Time is more of a mystery than a straight line tracing a circle round a clockface implies. It is the gift we are given at birth and the material we have to sculpt and the fear that wakes us at night to teach us about scarcity. Time is the magic that transports us, like a rollercoaster, when we stare into a photo from a moment that no longer exists.
“We tried to retire mystery in the West in the last few hundred years and enshrined reality’s sharp edges instead.”
- Krista Tippett
I look at that photo (above) of my youngest daughter, tiny in the hugeness of the jungle, and I get lost in the reality of it. That all really happened! That was real, but it’s no longer true. We are all different now. Time has changed us.
I’m still me, searching and sifting and wanting and letting go. Squinting into that photo, I feel part of me present in a time I’ll never get back to, even if I return to the very same spot on earth. My job as a mother has changed. Looking at my young kid, I remember that I was also younger. I mostly forget that now, but I was a younger mother. I was a different person. Reality has shape-shifted and time has changed me.
“Experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath…it just keeps coming at you.”
- Zadie Smith
Oh, those little people in the photos! Those beautiful babies, they are gone, totally gone, never to be held or cuddled again. She/me, the young mother is gone, too. But we are both always dreaming of the day when we can be present in the current moment, not nostalgic for a past (the freedom of being childless!) or longing for the future (a future when I have so much time to myself), but content with the birdsong and fresh air pouring through the open window, a blanket on my lap, my teacup drained, wanting nothing but another cup of tea and to just live in this spot forever.
“Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning to an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.”
- Ruth Ozecki
Dear readers and friends, thank you for being here. Some of you may know of my love for playgrounds. I’ve come to think of this Wanderlife project is an evolving art form, my playground, and a place to find and give joy. What I’m sharing today falls into the category I’ve been calling “Gratitudes,” though it’s not taken directly from my Sunday-evening journaling ritual. Instead I’m sharing a bit of writing that I did on the second day of a short course called Spring Light led by the writer
. She offered a prompt to spend a minute describing something abstract. I found myself writing, once again, about the way time messes with me.I’ll end with another quote, this one from Islamic scholar Omid Safi about the power of prayer. My cultural lineage is German Catholic, so the word prayer implies a tradition I don’t personally connect with, but I know of no better way to slow down time than to embrace the mysterious and ever-present now.
“We speak about being scatterbrained. The truth of the matter is that the scatteredness is much more systematic. We are scattered at every level: body, soul, mind, spirit.
To pray with the heart, to have presence in the heart, is a remedy.
It is a healing, an un-scattering.
Presence is simply to have our heart be where our feet are.This starts with a mindfulness, with an awareness of the breath.”
I can’t be the only person missing my baby-children, wanting to press pause sometimes, and also noting my mind wandering into the future. Let me know if you have secrets of time-travel and what feelings arise when you look at photos from your past lives. And feel free to share Wanderlife with anyone who loves to wander and is open to life!
Sincerely,
I am from the school that believes time is a construct, an invention for our convenience, so we can have schedules, calendars, clocks and timetables. I have written elsewhere about time and how I regard it as a precious gift every day to be spent or invested however we choose. Years ago I had to be careful when someone said, "I didn't have time....." because so often I wanted to say, we all have the same amount of time. What you meant was you chose to do other things and postponed what didn't get done and that may be OK too. Or maybe not...
We live in Mexico and maybe the cultural descendants of the Mayans have influenced how people here regard time, very different from the U.S. where there seems to be more of an obsession about being "on time" and getting things done ASAP. Manána here dosen't necessarily mean tomorrow. It means maybe or whenever. ;-)
I so resonate with trying to squeeze minutes longer and then running late... the tug and pull between lingering in moments and being “on time.” I appreciate that the Greeks had two different words to describe these two experiences of time: chronos (chronological time) and Kairos (pregnant, spacious time). Creating space and honoring kairos time has been a big part of my journey, and quite counter-cultural in task-oriented, progress-driven societies.