My work week is a fairly programmed thing. Every day's schedule, as well as everything within that day, is set and unsurprising. As a result, my weeks are fairly quotidian. Time seems to slip by so that before I know where (or when) I am, it's Friday again and time for homemade pizza and then the weekend is over and Monday looms and suddenly it’s Friday again.
This rather prosaic routine provides me with some comfort, it is true. Each day may have small surprises, but the mechanism is unwavering. I know when I'll be at work and when I'll be at the gym and when I'll be home. I know when I'll be doing the gruesome data entry work, when I'll be helping the public, when I'll be wrapping up, packing up and heading home. I know when we’ll be meeting for dinner, when the trash and recycling need to be taken out, when the dogs need to be fed and when it’s time to sleep and wake.
Like the set perspective of a person on a never-ending merry-go-round, the seasons change, weekends come and go, holidays spring by like fleet gazelles chased by unseen cheetahs, but the routine reigns and is unwavering. This whirling rush of life can become somewhat comfortable and I sometimes find myself lulled into a blank drowsiness where time blends into one long smear of experience, like the blur of scenery from a speeding train.
Over the last few years, I started taking a week off of work near my Springtime birthday to get some groundskeeping done around our home. I use the time to facilitate an easier transition from blowing fallen Autumn leaves and raking winter’s twigs and branches to mowing the growing grass and weeds of Spring and summer.
During this particular week off, the regular driving rhythm of the typical work week is exchanged for the undefined beat of a single human laboring under the sky. Time seems to stretch out before me. The days are almost luxuriantly long. The perspective changes and the spinning daily and weekly thrumming halts abruptly. Like stepping from the solidity of a dock onto a moored boat, the sensation is somewhat pleasantly disorienting.
My time ceases to be defined by my schedules and meetings and projects and the ice-cream headache agony of regularly occurring drudgery. Suddenly, I am free. The clocks and calendars have no meaning. The hour between nine and ten in the morning on any given day seems to stretch on like a desert vista, the same in every direction.
By the end of that week, of course, the disorientation fades and the days begin to speed again, gaining momentum as I trudge around our grounds swinging my rakes and shovels and genuinely enjoying the mindlessness of physical labor, full of promise (and shorn of emails and meetings).
If I dared to take another week, by the end of it I would once again be lolling like a dozing cat in a sunbeam. The mechanical repetition of the yardwork and groundskeeping causing the moments to speed by unaccounted and unappreciated. The only difference being that rather than fading to fishbelly white under the bright fluorescents in my office in a daze, I would be browning nicely under the burnishing sun in a daze.
This is the mystery of being temporal entities, living as we do on the stream of passing time. The more we try to hold a fixed position, the more we realize how quickly life moves by us, like leaves on a rain-swollen river.
There is some merit in the change of pace, however. It stops the daily doze and awakens a kind of surreal understanding of the passage of time—or my passage through it. Every few moments, I can stop my work, look around and enjoy the Now. Of course, time doesn't stop. There are no anchored points; no solidity in the timestream, but they can become rooted in our awareness if we stop a bit and notice the Now. If we can break our mindless nodding to the unending beat of time and see the stable moments in our minds.
This is the ideal; the strange gift of our weirdly evolved perceptive abilities. "The trouble is you think you have time," says the unknown sage. There's an aphorism in AA that maintains, "Time takes time." These are mighty handy apothegms for keeping us steady in the day-today spin. We often look forward to some point on the horizon, excited for this or that event or change in the pace of circumstances. Sometimes we pine for ‘the old days’ when things seemed simpler or less frustrating.
Right Now is all we really have and even that is an illusion.
The challenge is to remember that, as the great hurricane of daily life stuns us with its intense music of ticking clocks, we have the power to stand up, go to the window of our consciousness and look out, appreciating something that we would have otherwise missed. There are no two sunsets or sunrises alike but they are all beautiful. We miss them all if we’re not paying attention. A moment with Micki, time with our adult children; a walk, a dinner, a drop of stillness in a raging sea of things to do. We can carry them with us, but only if we stop to acknowledge them along the way.
Life moves pretty fast, if Ferris Bueller knew what he was talking about. I don't want to be so zombied out by the steady, rhythmic, stultifying passage of time that I lose sight of my in-built ability to see things within time and appreciate them despite how quickly life speeds by. Life is too precious. Family and friends and our illusory moment together—the tiny blink of consciousness in the great well of human experience—all are too important and too valuable to be missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment