Twenty years ago I went to addiction treatment and time stood still. That month remains one of the very few clearcut dividing lines of before and after in my life. Time split wide open and stepped outside itself and ceased to mean anything like it used to. But this is not an essay about my recovery, I just use it as an example of the variances and vagaries of time.
In a simpler sense, consider this: sixty minutes in the dentist’s chair subjected to whirling instruments of torture is just not the same as sixty minutes spent walking on the beach, or listening to really good music. Or think about what I call the “from warp,” where the time coming home from a place you never went to before feels shorter than when you were in a state of uncertainty going there. Time is such a strong social construct that we forget it can mean both nothing and everything: nothing when you are first wildly in love with your honey; everything when you and honey are late for a flight after your wedding.
Time seems eager to make itself important. To go back to addiction recovery for a moment, in some programs there is an emphasis on the amount of time you are sober or drug free and special ceremonies and tokens given out for specific numbers of days, months, or years. But ultimately,we only have this day (actually only this now) and calendars are just brackets around chunks of our experiences. The reliance on linear measurement tyrannizes, but that method is only one flavor in the smorgasbord of how we experience time.
The essayist Brian Doyle writes about a lot of things with grace and emotional wallop. Here he nails an aspect of how we pass through time:
Time stutters and reverses and it is always yesterday and today. Maybe the greatest miracle is memory. Think about that this morning, quietly as you watch the world flitter and tremble and beam.
This morning on my walk I saw a trio of Monarch butterflies flitting in formation next to a wooden fence. From there I was cast in my memory to the beach at Hunting Island where I was recently captivated by brown pelicans cruising splendidly over the trees. Then it was a random memory of my conclusion years ago that the swooshing sounds created by hiking through leaves, sand, snow, and grasslands all sound the same, if you listen just right. Returning to the moment I realized I was passing a patch of Zinnias and there were more than a dozen Monarchs fluttering in and out, up and around the flowers, a few seconds on one and then departing for another.
That is just one example of how time compresses, and it is yesterday, today and random days simultaneously, and suggests why memory is such a miracle: it transports without a ticket andprovides feelings for free. My recent birthday seems to spark such memory journeys, maybe it has to do with being able to look back decades of highs and lows. One manifestation of this kind of journey is looking at losses of loved ones.
This is not as morbid as it might sound. It is, for me, an element of getting older and passing time. There is immense gratitude added into the mix as I think about loved ones that added so much to life. In a particular way, the loss of my parents fits a category of what I’ll call Instantly Eternal time. They both died in a flash, in foreign countries while in transit.
The first was my father, Bernie, in 1984. He died at 35,000 feet, sitting in an airplane seat flying somewhere over Africa, on his way home from a business trip. He slumped after a massive heart attack took him the rest of the way up to heaven. After an emergency landing it took some figuring out to get his body to the U.S. I delivered one of the eulogies at age 22, three weeks before my first wedding. I remember riffing on the phrase, “wishing will make it so,” which was the title of a song he used to play on the piano.
Then it was my mother, Rene, in 2001. She died in the lobby of a Holiday Inn Express in Brussels, Belgium. It was right after she had breakfast with two of my sisters and was headed back to her room to pack for the second leg of the trip home. A massive stroke struck her down and that was it. I also delivered a eulogy, this time at 39, three months before my son was born. I reflected on how she ended our phone calls by reminding me to “look both ways,” a ritualized expression of love.
My point is that these instants became eternities; loss of life is a one way trip. Of course you can look at these instants in all sorts of ways. It’s a blessing to have times of loving people, places, and things, but it’s also a curse. In the wrong state of mind memories can imprison us, keep us stuck.
Ultimately, we end up living in every instant, right up until we give way to eternity. The quest is to enjoy the moments that form into patterns that rise into cycles and turn into periods that continue the journey of ashes to ashes; dust to dust: a lifetime.
In memory of Jeff Evans. I only wish I knew him longer.
