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Back on time
Credit: Google Images
I’ve promised my students at least one post per two weeks, or half their load of a blog post a week. With this post, I’m back on time (within two weeks) and I’m back on time (the subject).
Here’s what I know:
- how much time my boys’ soccer halves and lacrosse and football quarters run
- a good time for my son’s freestyle 100
- the time it takes to drive to work
- the time it takes to teach a class, attend a meeting, hold office hours
- the time it takes to drive back from work
- that, to my sons, time is relative, not quantifiable
- that Google Maps is eerily correct about what time I’ll arrive at my destination
Here’s what I don’t know:
- How Google Maps does it
- The time I’ll arrive at any given appointment, unless Google Maps tells me, but even then I might be running behind. (Time is relative, after all.)
- How much time I have left
- If time can be transcended
This hyper-focus on time kicked in several weeks ago when – for the first time – I inadvertently let a class out 30 minutes early. I thought time was up. (I’ve since wondered if, at 49, my time is up.) Lately, I’ve paid more attention to synchronicity at play, as it always is whether I’m paying attention or not. For example, last week I sat in traffic ruminating over being late to watch a game when the Rolling Stone’s “Time is on My Side” came on. Another time in the span of a couple of days maybe, I’d look at a clock or watch just as it read 11:11 and 4:44 and 3:33. Finally, yesterday, I caught a portion of the lyrics from the Talking Head’s song, “Once in a Lifetime.”
David Byrne sings: “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”
As with much of Byrne’s work, I’m not sure what he means. His words are mysterious. Still, I love the lyrics, and here’s what they make me think.
“Time isn’t holding us” – We cannot be held by time; we are outside of time’s reach. And if we are outside of time’s reach, we are somehow transcending time. The notion of transcending time reaches into metaphysics, which is pretty cool…but the “answers” offered aren’t “knowable.” They’re illusive and, therein lies discomfort for many, including me. Who wants uncertainty?
“Time isn’t after us” – We don’t need to be so defensive with time. Time moves along just fine, carefree and ignorant of the ways we fight it: face-lifts, excessive exercise, addictions of all sorts. We don’t have to run from it. Instead, we can move along with time at our own pace, secure that we’ll get there when we get there. What’s “there?” A specific place? The end or beginning of a period in life? A new state of consciousness?
It’s time to stop. For two posts in a row, I’ve had the luxury of not writing a conclusion. Perhaps this is my way of fighting time. After all, how can we measure something that begins but does not end?
[For my students on the writing process: one crappy first draft (20 min), one edit (15 min), one failure to post within two weeks, even though I lied above about being on time (5 days).]
Posted in Philosophical, Questions
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Timeout
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
— The first lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of his four grand poems published as The Four Quartets.
Relative Synchronicity
After the cosmic time sweep in Eliot’s first sentence, the third sentence brings me along toward understanding that ruminating or regretting the past is a waste of time. After all: “All time is unredeemable.” I don’t get it back. So, why fret with “abstraction” when I can live here now, present for life’s impressive and sometimes-random and sometimes-sychronistic events?
Plans do not always go according to plan, and I get caught up in periodic abstraction. Something snags my attention — either on the conscious or sub-conscious level — and I settle into too much thinking, not enough doing. Fortunately, living with three sons provides little time for rumination. Someone always needs a ride. There are games to watch, runs to Moe’s to make, and homework to help with. (I apologize for blowing the Queen’s English by ending a sentence with a preposition; however, the proper way sounds stiff. I pay attention to choices like that, not wanting to lose readers as I might, say, were I to go off on a tangent.)
Back to this notion of time from T.S. Eliot’s mind. The first sentence? What comes to mind is a river, how no two moments are the same. Now comes and is gone; the present sweeps past, and the future promises more of the same.
The Snake River, Montana
Once, I spent a month discovering a river — the entire length of the Catawba River — for an article. I was on a deadline and had dozens of stops to make along its 225 miles. Despite the pressures faced by any journalist (accuracy, word counts, editors), the river kept me company throughout the process. It soothed me and made writing its story almost effortless. I’m grateful I got that assignment. Rivers have always mesmerized me, but it wasn’t until after traveling the Catawba that I came to understand their connection with time.
(Notes on the writing process for my students: I drafted this over 45 “writing minutes” — perhaps 15 minutes in, my son needed a ride to Chik-fil-A. I returned, wrote some more, then looked outside. The National Weather Service website reported 80 degrees. I eyed my watches (minus wristbands – watches stand the test of time, wristbands do not). It is now early afternoon, Labor Day. This post will go unfinished now, but I’ll return, edit and create a conclusion another time. After all, all time is unredeemable. If I stay seated, I’ll wonder why I didn’t get outside. “What might have been” will become “a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation.”
So,
Time out.
Posted in Parenting, Philosophical, Traveling, Writing
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Found in the Folder “Funny”
8. Befuddlement – I had to read this list three times.
Posted in Absurd
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The Walkabout & Gender
I need to make changes to my dormant publishing company’s website and, in the process, I read my “About” copy today:
Located in Charlotte, NC, Walkabout Press publishes nonfiction and fiction books and web content for an active, intelligent, and curious readership. Publisher Malcolm W. Campbell named the company after the Australian Aboriginal custom of walkabout, whereby an Aborigine disappears into the bush to follow his heart and walk for weeks or months on end without a destination in mind. The Aborigine follows “songlines,” or directions embedded in the earth that only he can see. The journey, of course, is one of self-discovery and of living fully in the present. Walkabout Press strives to publish books and Web content that encourage people to take walkabouts from their busy lives-through travel, sports, or reading engaging works of fiction.
I understand why I wrote what I did then, eight years ago. Would I write this same “About” copy today about a company with the same mission? No. Why? The gender pronoun use.
I have no argument with either side of this debate. Do what works for you in your writing. I’m just intrigued by the way language changes during time, and how I’m sometimes willing to change with it.
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Hello, again.
I’m glad to be back at Calls to Adventure after an extended time away: five years (rounding up). I’ve been on a five-year walkabout during which I learned many things. One, for example, is that I miss this space. When I last posted, I didn’t realize it’d be so long before I’d write here again. But looking back, I remember knowing that I’d return; I just didn’t know when. That time’s now. I’m ready to have another go. See you round the bend.
Recent dinner with my three sons. Mom was out of town.
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So much beauty in the world…and nothing to fear.
Copyright 2009, DreamWorks Studios
That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.
— Ricky Fitts, American Beauty
Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), enlightened-misfit artist who lives next door to not-yet-enlightened Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), in Sam Mendes’ and Alan Ball’s brilliant film, American Beauty, videotapes the “sacred…in the ordinary:”* his parents at home, a plastic grocery bag “dancing” in the wind, a dead bird.
He captures the beauty to remember.
Last night, we attended an art show by a famous musician, S (for Short for…). He spoke, and 200 people listened. He did what I suspect many artists do: rambled through the mundane en route to the meaningful, circled around to hilarity. (His story about playing onstage with Willie Nelson makes me smile now.) S punctuated his talk with a few fly-by’s at what cannot be spoken, making what T.S. Eliot called “raid[s] on the inarticulate.”
One story, in particular, I will remember when I hear his band’s music or see his art or read his name:
Leaving his home in rural North Carolina, S passed a horse in a field that passed in the night. He had to be somewhere but felt compelled to return to his house and retrieve his camera. S walked into the field and photographed the horse. S told the audience that perhaps this was morbid, photographing a dead horse.
But I don’t believe he thought it was. I didn’t think it was.
Standing before us, S looked down, as he must have when standing above the horse. Perhaps he was remembering that moment, reliving it, maybe forgetting that 200 people were listening.
In the field, he said, he was thinking how this body in the grass was on its journey toward becoming dirt.
As S spoke of the horse, I remembered American Beauty. I remembered that artists cannot look away. (I don’t remember who said that.)
When artist Tom Schulz introduced S, he said great artists make him want to paint. I’m grateful to S and to Ricky Fitts (created by Alan Ball, brought to life by Sam Mendes and Wes Bentley) and to Tom and Sheila Ennis and Lisa Rubenson and Lauren and to the entire “Team A” that put together the event. They make me want to write.
Why?
Because there’s so much beauty in the world, and I want to remember that. I want to remember that it’s okay for my heart to feel so much that sometimes it hurts. And I want to remember that there is nothing to fear.
*From Deng Ming-Dao’s unnamed poem in 365 Tao (HarperOne):
Umbrella, light, landscape, sky.
There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary.
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Paterno passes the puck with passive voice
Joe Paterno ( AP Photo/Pat Litlle, 2009)
I just read read a piece online (link to article in quote), and I’m peeved. There’s a more powerful phrase that alliterates with today’s P’s: I’m pi**ed off.
Allow me my soap pox for the moment:
“Paterno ‘knew inappropriate action was taken by Jerry Sandusky with a youngster’ in 2002.”
“...knew inappropriate action was taken by…” WTP?
In this context, passive voice reduces the impact of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged criminal acts of pedophilia. Plus it pushes Paterno one step further from complicity. Preferable: “Paterno knew Jerry Sandusky took inappropriate action with youngster in 2002.”
And “youngster?” Please. Spare us that word choice, which subtly connotes playfulness, boys being boys, easy-going participation. How about the truth? “Child.”
In a perfect world of words, paid spinmeisters protecting the powerful would be prohibited from “speaking” on behalf of their clients. Parterno would have to speak for himself. Perhaps, he’d stumble upon what ought to be put before the public:
“I knew Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile, that he abused a child in my facilities in 2002. I chose not to go to the police over the weekend.”
Paterno is not the criminal in this case. But make no mistake: he’s complicit, and his posse is using the passive voice to propose Paterno’s complicity is, well, less complicit.
There. I’ve said my peace. I’m going outside now to play soccer, or ride bikes, or simply be present while my children enjoy a sunny day. I need to unplug and let my pessimism lessen amidst the innocent shouts and joys of childhood.
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