Keeping Time
Perhaps, like me, you operate a bit outside of the standard understanding of time. Maybe you’re often early or often late. Maybe you spend hours daydreaming and maybe those dreams are deeply important to your life in ways that defy explanation. Maybe you’ve never quite made the timestamps on things like high school graduation or college graduation or partnerships or parenthood or professional accomplishments or retirement savings.
If so, these notes are for you. I’ve committed to twelve monthly time explorations—a year’s worth. These will take longer than a calendar year; I’m curious to learn just how much longer, and I also want to know why. I keep these notes here (and here) so that I can revisit them on days when I feel exhausted and harried. I share them with the hope that they’ll bring others comfort too.
Warm Blankets
Just as salt brings food to life, tenderness infuses OTC topical rubs and dishtowel thin blankets with a healing capacity they do not possess in and of themselves.
First the Tornado
Which brings me to the most basic unknowns, whether or not N and I will be alive and able-bodied this time next year, able to pack up my Prius and creep our way through an absolutely godforsaken storm with tons of hope that the chaos will pass and we’ll soon be sitting in lawn chairs staring up into the rare and blessed dark.
Beginninglessness
After decades of searching, I’ve only found two beliefs I trust: life is causal; all is interconnected. Even if story is nothing but a clumsy tool, it’s a tool I’ve got. If I were dropped into the middle of a wilderness with nothing but a hammer to help me survive, I wouldn’t toss the hammer off a cliff for being nothing but a hammer. I’d probably name it Wilson, after that damn Volleyball in Cast Away.
Spiral Time
What Marta Rose describes seems to me the difference between a labyrinthine, iterative, meaning-oriented understanding of my tangible contributions to this life and a capitalist, linear, goal-oriented one. Both matter to me. I need to make money. I also want to meet my death feeling that I befriended the marvel of my own life.
