Time

Let me share something with you that recently entered my brain by “chance” (is there such thing?) and has been wreaking havoc there ever since: 

“...there is something about our embodiedness and about the kinds of exchange that the bodies have, which is intrinsic to intelligence itself. Or at least–put it a little less loadedly–what we would have to mean by intelligence would have to be very different were it not so involved in the exchange and confrontation and encounter of bodies and therefore with the taking of time. The dream so often seems to reduce to that persistent aspiration that there could be ways of knowledge, ways of knowing, ways of mastery, which didn’t depend on the contingencies of taking time. On the labor of finding one's way around and indeed therefore on the difficulty of inhabiting our environment. And that’s one of the last points I want to underline here: difficulty. I think difficulty is good for us. And I say that….because difficulty is one of those things which obliges us to take time. Rather obviously. The more time we take, the more our discovery is likely to turn into habit and inhabiting. The less time we take, the easier we find something to resolve, map, and digest, the less value, the less significance it will have. It’s actually rather an old chestnut. Platonic philosophers and early Christian theologians were saying millennia ago that the more easily you’ve thought you’ve got to know something, the less you care about it. Difficulty imposes a discipline. It imposes a willingness to believe that there is more to work on. And in that sense, also, of course, by reminding us that getting to where we are has taken time, it can also be one of those things that reminds us that our cultural perspective, temporal or geographical, is not the only obvious one. Taking time, the awareness of the more that we have not yet absorbed, may be one of the things (may be–it doesn’t absolutely have to be–but it may be one of the things) that gives us that little bit more patience with the criticism, the challenge, the alternative view of another world, another culture, another person. It may be mysteriously one of those things that builds solidarity rather than division. In other words, that extends the cooperation that properly belongs to knowledge” (“The Tree of Knowledge: Bodies, Minds and Thoughts,” Rowan Williams  [transcription and emphasis mine]).

If you read my blog post regarding the pace of winter and my difficulty with it (entitled “Fallow Time”), you know I’ve been struggling with the passage of time and its limitations. Hearing Williams’ words put a kind of immediate halt to the way I was thinking about the movement of my life and my response to it. I have felt stuck of late, and therefore longed for a “getting on with it” kind of zipping ahead on the many dormant things in my life: work, art, calling, ministry etc.

Williams’ contemplation about body, knowledge, time, and difficulty in this talk (which anyone can randomly search out on Youtube, as I did), suddenly introduced to me a clarity about the enormous gift of the limitation of time. To contemplate that I, a designed-physical body, was intentionally meant to exist within this boundary has caused me to consider that perhaps it’s not a curse after all, but a very purposeful grace. I cannot affect time’s movement, but only experience and exist within it. And there seems to be something quite imperative about that fact.

Since hearing those words, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about time. It’s not actually a prison, is it? Rather, it’s a vehicle. It’s one of the primary vehicles that humanity uses to travel through this finite world. It keeps us oriented to our place in the cosmos. It’s a magnetic force grounding us so that we will not float away, unattached. Moments, the smallest unit of the passage of time, keep us steadily in place. 

I have hated Time for most of my life because of the second half of Williams’ equation: The difficulty. To be held fast by time means to have to face every single thing that enters our sphere until that thing passes. My hatred of time really has been a hatred of the difficulty I have experienced. I have spent far little of the time of my life appreciating these difficulties. I think now of the repeated rejection I experienced as a child and young adult, and of how it split open my heart. Ragged and bloody, it widened and tenderized so that I eagerly became a place that other rejected souls might find waiting for them with welcome.

I think too of longing for a biological baby and never having one–and how those lines I cast out into the ether never caught what I aimed for. But when I reeled in the cords, I found myself connected to a random and beautiful group of people I never knew existed. Others who also knew the life-long ache of infertility and loss, including the family that we would become forever connected to via adoption. 

And I think about the deep, dark place of becoming a mom of three under two.

(you’re not supposed to say this aloud, so I’ll do it for you: parenting can be quicksand. It can pull you under suddenly, when you thought you were walking on solid ground, and struggling does you no good in saving you from suffocation. It closes in on you. It becomes the only thing around you. And it can slowly kill you. This is why you must never ever go it alone)

I was immediately drowning when I brought those two babies home and I did not feel solid ground under my feet for at least a year–even then, it was a tiptoe kind of standing–exhausting and uncertain. The gifts of not only my three kids, but of having them at the time, in the order and spacing that I did, forced me to know myself at last. To recognize my deadly need for human approval and my back-breaking drive to maintain the love of others by sacrifice and service. I was forced to separate from those tethers because they could not hold in the storm of three babies, then three toddlers. And I finally became free. It’s a freedom I fight hard to maintain every day now. I was not going to go willingly into that liberation, and probably not ever in my own interest alone. I accepted the dive into these waters for the love of my babies and my husband and found only later that I could keep doing it for love of myself. 

Something else may have introduced that freedom to me eventually, but the point is, I am speaking of time and difficulty seems to be intrinsically linked here, as Williams has pointed out. It is an inevitable aspect of the construct. Time is made of beauty and suffering. They are melded together. We try to separate them–it’s one of the many impossible tensions we fail to maintain as humans (but not for lack of trying). 

I am waking up to the beauty of time. It’s very slow and it painstakingly comes and goes like drifting in and out of the dream world. I am reminded of that story from the Book of Virtues, about a boy with a magical ball of thread that, once pulled, leaps him forward in time. He cannot leap backwards, once he has made that choice. He cannot make up for that decision—go back and glean what he chose to leave behind. I always felt so horrified by this story–a deep disturbance I couldn’t express at the unrectifiable regret therein. Thankfully, none of us have that ability to move time forward. We are protected from such devastating loss. We try to grasp that power and instead, end up holding an imitation of it called distraction. We pretend to exit time by ignoring it. We look up and realize that our loved one has been talking for several minutes but we don’t know what words they were saying. We can block out the things that our world is offering our senses, put up shields to experiences with nature and people alike. We can make choices that stymie the effects of time, though not alter its inevitabilities.  

We do need the relief of a bird’s eye view sometimes. And that, may I argue, is in large part the function of art. Poetry. Movies. Plays. Paintings. Music. Liturgy. We feel like we can transcend time in those spaces. It is a beautiful gift: the opportunity to jump ship without ever actually leaving. It gives us perspective and, if we let it, grace. 

The longest shortest time. What a perceptible phrase. Life crawls on at the speed of light. I still don’t like it–where I am right now in the flow of time. I want things to change. There are some dreams that haven’t come to fruition that I am still longing for, and I feel a deep and grace-filled permission to do so. But I am trying now to slow myself down to the presence of my physical form. To match pace with my whole self so that I don’t miss life as I wait for it to happen.