I did not listen to this podcast about time today because, well, I ran out of time. But merely reading the synopsis lead me to think this morning about our inability to grasp the concept of time (even as we are bound to time as measured by a clock so precisely that we can feel defeated if we show up one minute late to an appointment or a ballet class).
I thought about the sublime moments in your life when you imagine that you would like time to stand still. It's a fiction, of course. You don't really ever want time to stand still, you merely want the pleasure to last, or to forestall the onset of pain, emotional or otherwise. Time, in my imagination is nothing more than a compilation of experiences and events. The older you are, the more of them you have accumulated. (So you could measure your age not in number of orbits around the sun, but in the strength and number of events lived through.) You may think that you have fewer experiential opportunities left as you get older (once you've lived it, it's not in your future anymore), but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. When you are very young, the enormity of what lies before you can be frightening. In your midlife, you pack in a lot, running through each day so quickly that you hardly notice what you've checked off for the day. But when you're older, assuming you have food and shelter and a modicum of strength left and a brain that hasn't (yet) totally atrophied, time is finally yours to work with, to think about, and yes, to experience in a way that feels quite often sublime, even though there's no reason for it to feel sublime, because nothing's happening, no intense new romance is brewing, no child is born to you, no promotion has been offered. Perhaps this is what living in the moment is meant to accomplish for you? Creating something important, even out of nothing? Every aspect of every hour increasingly becomes yours to examine, to respect and love.
I'm remembering the book my classmate Marie gave me when I was 12. "You'll love it!" -- she said. (Marie figures, surprisingly, prominently in a chapter of Like a Swallow!) She was right -- I did love it. Cheaper by the Dozen. (It's been made into a movie which I'm sure cutsified the whole story. Me, I only know the book.) The dad in the (biographical) novel was an efficiency expert and one line toward the very end always stuck with me. When asked -- what do you want to save all those bits of time for? He said (if I'm remembering correctly) -- to twiddle your thumbs, to play mumblety-peg if that's what you like... I took it to heart. Being at an age when I liked the markers of boyishness (baseball mitt, pocket knife, skateboard), I purchased a pocketknife and when the occasion presented itself, I would throw it down into the ground, trying to get a handle on these unknown and dangerous boy games that none of my girl friends cared about. Save time... Saving anything did not come easy for me then. I always felt time might run out on me.
Snowdrop asked me today if a millennium was a thousand years. I affirmed that it was. She then marveled how short a second was when placed against a millennium. Maybe. Today is Santa Lucia Day, celebrated in Sweden and some other Scandinavian communities (as well as in Sicily and parts of Italy). I understand that St. Lucia was a Sicilian Christian martyr, having lived and died sometime in the 200's CE, so very many seconds ago. I have never seen this in person, but I understand in Sweden, little girls and boys parade in white outfits with crowns of light on their heads on this day. They usher in the Christmas season. Okay, I like traditions like the next person and children with lights on their heads do look awfully sweet, but is it a coincidence that this ritual caught fire (!) in the darkest countries on the planet? It is indeed interesting to think about how much these holiday rituals are an amalgam of religious, pagan and sentimental (for lack of a better word) beliefs. Bonfires at solstice were lit to chase away evil and alter the course of the sun (they worked! after December 21st, the days grow longer!). But who wouldn't want to keep to that habit of celebrating light when there's so little of it in the week that is before us? Eight days until Solstice, twelve days until Christmas...
This brings me right back to my starting point: time, as it is fashioned and understood by a person who is past her youth, past her midlife. Past the moment where playing with a penknife would be attractive. So, I have a light-therapy lamp. I purchased it some while ago because I read that light therapy is the only effective way to chase away winter blues. I was going to be ready for the shortest of short days! But I haven't used it and by now, at age 69, I know I never will. I should just put it on Craigslist. Fact is, I like these uniquely special days when light is scarce, though still there, fleetingly, and then replaced by candles and Christmas tree lights. It's as beautiful to me as bonfires and wreaths with (hopefully fake) candles on children's heads may be to Santa Lucia celebrants. I'm sure if I lived near the Equator and the sun set every day at 6 pm and rose every morning at 6 am I would get used to it, but I would not be me if that were my life.
So, in a nutshell -- Happy St Lucia to you, to all people whose homes are in dark corners of the world. May there be light within your day, no matter how few are those hours of sunshine today. And may there be sublime moments too, even if you're younger than me and haven't reached that point where the sublime may be born out of nothing.
No sunshine here at the farmette. Just the quiet of a short December day.
I nearly went out to get croissants this morning but Ed talked me down. Yay Ed. We settled for oatmeal, but with the cherry rugelach at the side. [Snowdrop had asked me if the Rugelach were a Polish pastry and I mistakenly said no. I had always located these in Central Europe -- Austria maybe. But in fact, these little crescents originated in the Jewish communities of Poland. The French croissant owes its existence to these pastries!]
And Dance played peacefully on the kitchen table and the morning was off to a good start.
The afternoon belongs to Snowdrop. I pick her up from school. But we have little time to play.
(Just enough time to ask Ed about his latest machine design and open her Advent card...)
She has ballet today and (a limited number of) family members are invited. Her mom and I attend.
(ready to go!)
And here I am, thinking about time again, but now in the context of not so long ago. Because after the class does a demonstration of exercises...
... they move on to do a little performance of a Nutcracker number, to the music of a dance that I know too well, because it launched my younger daughter's long run in the Madison Nutcracker some thirty years ago. And now here's Snowdrop, dancing away to the way too familiar to me music.
Time has taken a leap forward. Memories, connecting events from the past to this day, so that yet again life isn't measured in years, in dates, in minutes, but in the continuity that links everything essential into one string of experiences and emotions.
Complicated? Yes, time is complicated. No, we do not fully understand it. For now, we are free to make of it what we can. At my age -- to embrace it as you would embrace your dearest friend. With enthusiasm, understanding, compassion and love.
