Part 3: Time’s Not Real
Here we are, at our final thoughts on time. For a refresher of the first two parts visit Part 1: Rough Meditations on Time: A Three-Part Essay Type Thing and Part 2: Non-negotiable Activities & Three artists on time, though you needn’t.
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. ”
Arbitrary Time
A seed packet says 6-8 weeks for the seedling to come up—the basil sprouts in four. A baby’s due on March 16—they arrive fashionably late on March 26, much to the tired mother’s chagrin. A plane says it will depart from Houston to Detroit at 8:14pm and two days later you’re still napping in the terminal. One hour waiting for a test result feels like 10 days, all day having a grand old time on the boat feels like one hour. Ranges, delays, bendy-noodle time—all these have led me to think of Time at its most potent as simply a suggestion, and most days I think of it as barely needing to be acknowledged.
“Allow a brief tangent as I profess my love of snails.”
Over and over, the task is done when it’s done, the event happens when it happens, life unfolds as it unfolds. We’ve made ourselves blue in the face worrying about things happening at certain times, we’re running around like big human blueberries with all our worries and blueness and time woes, and ultimately, it all just happens when it happens.
Many of my loved ones feel stress to have things happen at a certain time, and I’ve felt it too. That seizing of fear clutching your heart that things aren’t happening fast enough.
At my most comfortable with time, I was telling everyone I worked with that my spirit animal was a snail—just trudging along, climbing blades of grass for miles, forging slowly slowly and when I can soothe myself enough with time it still feels true. Allow a brief tangent as I profess my love of snails: They just do it right in so many ways—they wear a fabulous caracol meaning they’re always glamorous. They can hide quickly in their tiny mobile house--an introvert’s dream. And finally, they’re not idle—they’re not just lounging around waiting for life to happen at them. They’re following Goethe’s brilliant and pithy mantra: do not hurry do not rest. They come to an impasse—a sidewalk—to them it’s the Great Wall, and they simply press on, unflapped by the enormity of the task at hand.
The snail is getting where it needs to go, patient and dedicated.
Rage against Time
As I wrote this piece on Time, I recalled a beautiful email, written years ago by one of my cousins about a milestone birthday she was coming up to. She was unnerved by it and trying to coach herself through the start of this new epoch (age 40).
A professor of literature, my cousin took a step back and highlighted the fact that her mentor (also an acclaimed woman of letters) after hitting this milestone birthday, had gone to:
develop two universities, write multiple books, advise scores of doctoral dissertations, throw dozens of dinner parties, mentor hundreds of students, parent a highly gifted son, enjoy more than 40 more years of marriage, win the National Medal for the Humanities, and to become one of the most insightful literary critics since C.S. Lewis after the age of 40.
***
The sweeping set of her mentor’s post-40 marvels sort of robbed the legitimacy from my cousin’s birthday angst. It set the writer of the email and the readers free to stop worrying about that incessant tick tock tick tock and to simply get on with things. Clearly, we have long lists or short lists of all we want to do on this wild spinning ball of earth and water, but what they all have in common is a lack of the activity called “Worrying about the Time passing and how old we are.”
If we can keep striving and forge on, no matter the age, the time, the weather—we will do it right—it, being live. Teresa d’Avila’s prayer begins “May today you trust that you are exactly where you need to be.”
Let that sink in.
Whether it’s Tuesday or Sunday, 4:15pm or 7 in the morning, whether you’re 80 or 4—don’t let the grains of sand dropping the hourglass haunt you.
My queen, Mary Oliver, captures it eloquently in her poem “The Summer Day”—an ode to embracing awareness, to claiming Time, being present with a nod to our inherent endings. She is lying in the grass, watching a grasshopper nearby, closely, observing the tiny grandeur of its normal actions—eating sugar out of the poet’s palm, washing its face, flying away. Oliver writes:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Let us do what we came to do: Enjoy. Witness. Let us really be here: Let us sit in the grass and feed the grasshopper, let us watch the pink yolk of the sun rise in the morning, let us sit with our hands in hands with our loved ones and rage against time with the fullness of our joy and love.