time as a raging river
“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would..."
If you wish to pensively stare out a window for a while and then promptly throw your watch off a bridge, go pick up The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.
I found so much about this book lovely, surprising and thought provoking.
The pages were filled with romantic, philosophical meanderings that I wouldn’t have expected in a book about the mysteries of time. Then again, what is more poetic than the very thing that holds our human existence in it’s grasp?
“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”
-Carlo Rovelli
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist(casual), breaks down how our experience of time is based on our perspective and the structure of our brain and emotions, rather than (as often assumed or even accused) from the physical universe. I’d recommend a read.
All that to say, this summer has traveled at a disconcertingly fast pace.
Which seems strange. Work has been slow, I’m staying at my parents for the summer and I have had few hard obligations. Yet here I find myself, at the end of July. A new chapter of University approaching, a move back to the beach for the winter and life passing on as it does. My 100 year-old grandmother occasionally wonders out loud why she’s still here when she’s content to move on. My beloved dog Odin moves a bit slower than he did the year before last, and the hairs on my head are quickly turning from auburn to silver. So time has its markers, it’s small ways of saying: the sand in your hourglass is steadily moving. Do with it what you will.
I’ve wondered about my life and the direction it has taken, how the pain of loss is woven so tightly with the love I experienced in the years prior to it. How it relates to the love I am experiencing after it. I marvel at the growth I’ve yet to experience because of hidden pain that still needs love, and all the beauty that I will discover as I go. I wonder about what else I will walk through in my life and how much of it will be outside my control, and if I’ll have the grace to know that all I can control is myself.
The older I get the more I find it fascinating how many people wish to erase their stories. Color the gray, fill the wrinkles, deny the very thing that is such a privilege…to grow old. Our modern culture is far from the first in history to be obsessed with staying young and desirable, but I find it to be a fascinating thing to observe in real time. I’ve had the privilege to watch as my great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mother have aged and some have passed on. I’ve watched bodies bend, hair turn white, muscles weaken, bodies and minds slow. Occasionally I’ll sit quietly as a mind tries to retrieve a memory that it can’t quite untangle. I feel it happening more often myself as my mind comes up blank for names, places, and memories that once were as tangible as the warm keys beneath my fingers.
“A moving object therefore experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a watch marks fewer seconds, a plant grows more slowly, a young man dreams less. For a moving object, time contracts.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
I pursued a slower way of life for a long time and watched as my friends had kids, got promoted and schedules got fuller and fuller. What I hadn’t realized is that the slower way of life had become a necessity to me. It helped me process the things in my life that had become increasingly difficult to navigate. There’s a hypothetical commencement speech from the 90’s by Mary Schmich called “Wear Sunscreen” which was later used in Baz Luhrmann’s “Everyone’s free to wear sunscreen”. It says worrying about the future is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. That the real troubles in your life will always be things that never crossed your worried mind.
I feel my life picking up speed. This summer has moved faster than I could have imagined and I can already see the end of it, not having accomplished half the things I expected to. This fall I’m going back to school. Work will pick back up. Projects are rolling in. Trips are being planned. Time feels different. After all this time…being busier is what I want.
So here’s the rub - and - I’ll admit - this is borrowed from a favorite movie of mine. But what if, we tried to live every day as though we had deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full and final day of our extraordinary, ordinary life?
How would it change our lives if we accepted that we can not change some things and if we let that be it’s own kind of gratitude. Some events cause excruciating pain and grief. You can not have the good without the bad. You can not have joy without sorrow because without one…the other does not exist. I do not say this from delusion of naiveté but from having been at the depths of grief, sorrow, and rage. I know betrayal and abandonment, grief, abuse and loss. Yet I also have known the greatest love, happiness, joy and beauty a human can know. One, needs the other. To avoid one is to lose the other.
Wherever you are today, I hope you know this:
Your life is whatever you choose it to be.
Time is passing, fast, slow, however you perceive it.
However you decide to spend it, it is yours.
We are where we are because of decisions made and because of things that were out of our control. But how we see this day, how we respond to challenges, opportunities, to love? Why, that’s entirely up to you isn’t it.
That is yours.