ON TIME//INTIMIDATED

ON TIME // INTIMIDATED

Round and round and round we spin,

To weave a wall to hem us in,

It won't be long, it won't be long

How slow and slow and slow it goes,

To mend the tear that always shows.

It won't be long, it won't be long.

- Neil Young

(listen to the whole song, "Round and Round", so lovely)

What does being on time mean to you? Showing up at an agreed upon time; listening to one's inner rhythms; doing what is expected. Time is such a nebulous concept and one that can mean different things to each of us -- it can cause conflicts, create anxiety, help give our lives structure and meaning, and so much more. We can pretend it doesn't affect us or that we are immune to its passing, whether with beauty products or "anti-aging" practices, or we can try to rise above or beyond it, as with meditation and other spiritual practices. 

Indeed, it is a strange reality that time can seem to stand still, go backwards, race ahead, and that's without getting into time loops, time  travel and quantum physics, things I know next to nothing about. But recently I have begun paying more attention to the way I talk about time, the way others do, and the way our culture as a whole tends to. "I don't have time for that." "I'll try to make time for you." "I couldn't find the time." 

Having time, making time, finding time...all so fascinating to think about. Is time a thing that can be made, lost or found? It exists certainly enough, as a human construct and as a spiritual state -- but what does it really mean to have time? We all have the same amount, every day. The number of hours we each have to live, however, is a mystery. What a strange existence this is.

Maria Popova (brainpickings.org), my favourite collector of great quotes by philosophers and writers past and present, took me down a veritable rabbit hole of musings about time. Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, Einstein -- I could have lost (or found?) hours following one link to the next. Mind-expanding and then, swiftly, overwhelming, and even intimidating. Time asserts itself in so many ways, and having a child about to make her way home from school and burst into the house, when one's writing for the day does not feel complete, is one of loudest ways. 

Rebecca Goldstein, author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, writes:

"The distinctions we make between the past and the present and the future — distinctions which are so emotionally fraught and without which we can’t even begin to describe our inner worlds — only have relevance within those inner worlds. Objective time, as it is characterized in relativity, can’t support the distinction between the past and the present and the future. Or, as Einstein told [philosopher and Vienna Circle member] Rudolf Carnap, “the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.”

Then there's this wild chart from the 1720s, showing the lengths some people will take in their attempts to understand and record time.

Find more great words, and links, here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/07/rebecca-goldstein-incompleteness-godel-einstein-time/

I have always loved time travel stories, starting probably with The Doll, by Cora Taylor -- a book about a girl who travels to the Canadian Prairie of the 1800s while delirious in bed with a magical doll. Now they are everywhere - too many to count, movies and books and tall tales of travel between worlds. I love them all and think time travel would be my super-power could I choose one. Anyone seen Age of Adeline? It's a fascinating premise, and one that can never be exhausted in my opinion (done well or badly, sure...)

Loose rambles today, and when this happens, I find poetry is a better medium for expressing myself:

in (time), dated

what does it mean to be intimidated

by your own life

all that time

to fill

not to waste

but if you do,

waste it, 

you still have more;

giving up isn't a thing 

that can really be done,

until you do, 

and then you don't even know how you did.

and what about the way my knees creak now,

when i go down stairs,

the sound bringing Mom back to me

with no conscious thought at all:

she was this age, once; 

had a teenage daughter, too,

who was me.

in, then out,

your body is this vessel 

for time,

but it passes through the same as for everyone,

indiscriminate

(but with favourites, it would seem)

up to you to take the strands, weave them, 

make a shiny thing that you feel proud to share,

keep yourself warm

at the end of the day

with some small flicker.

from Make Time, a handy and entertaining little guidebook by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

With love and almost on time,
Christine