A Matter of Time

This feels like one of those hard things to write. The title has been swirling around my head for weeks, and fragments of what I want to say have come to me in flashes, but I have this sense that this is going to be difficult to pull out of myself. It feels like extracting a long clump of hair from a plughole, or a throat, something that has been clogging up my ability to both breathe and speak, probably for a very long time.

It began when I was a child and I had the sense that I had already missed the boat and was already too old. Too old to be a gymnast. Too old to be a dancer. Too old to be an actress. Too old to get published. Of course, a lot of the time, I was too young. Too young to drink. Too young to direct the course of my life. Too young to be listened to. I was so young that so many of the things I felt I was too old for, I actually wasn’t.

I suspect the same thing is going on now. I suspect that I’ve been going round in little self-defeating circles for much of my life. So much of my life feels like a matter of time.

I am the White Rabbit in Alice, running late for a very important date with no time to say hello (goodbye!), I’m late I’m late I’m late.

I am the mildly panicked thought as I glance at the clock, It’s two fifteen! It’s four thirty-seven! It’s nearly ten! It’s just after three! No matter what the time, there is usually a sense that so much of it has passed, that it is running out somehow. I feel it on this holiday. The first two days were the best, because the rest of the holiday stretched out ahead of us, endless, unwritten. Now it is Thursday, and we fly back on Tuesday night, and I have to very deliberately remind myself that there are days and days left to enjoy. I have to go to battle against the feeling that we’re on a countdown to heading home.

* * *

I loved learning how to tell the time. It was logical. One represented one, and five, and also thirteen (on a twenty four hour count of a day). Two was two, but also ten, and fourteen. Three was three, and fifteen (or a quarter past), and fifteen again. The clock was reliable, simple and clever. The big hand moved quickly, the small hand was slow. In Mr Blackmore’s class, we used to play a game whereby we’d sit on the carpet, legs crossed, and would look at the clock which he’d taken off the wall, counting the second hand as it ticked and tocked its way around the clock face. Then, as it approached the 12, he’d turn the clock away so that we could only see the battery in the back, and the little round black wheel that you could use to adjust the clock - to change time. Go! He’d say, and off we would go, counting the seconds silently in our minds, beating out the rhythm of time. Some of us would tap our knees or move our fingers up and down in the air, a conductor without an orchestra, silently counting to sixty. Then, whenever we thought a minute had passed, we’d shoot our hand into the air. I was good at the game. I had the beat internalised. Someone circulated a rumour that if you put the word ‘elephant’, or even ‘Mississippi’ in between the seconds, it would help you count time accurately. But I didn’t use those tricks. They didn’t work for me. When I tried to, I was always too early, or too late. But when I listened to myself, when I remembered the ticking of the clock, the rhythm, the regularity of the beat, and when I resisted the urge to speed up or slow down, I found that I would shoot my hand up in the air right on the sixty second mark. I remember very little about the year spent in Mr Blackmore’s class, but I remember this.

* * *

When I write, I am trying to tell the truth – unvarnished, unembellished. It is not an easy thing to do. I am used to exaggerating, to choosing a bigger word when a simpler one would do. I say things are amazing when they are really just okay. I say I feel starving when what I am is something closer to hungry. But when I say what I say next, I do so with the intention of honesty.

The truth is, I have often felt plagued and imprisoned by time. I feel it mocking me as it passes, pointing out all that I have not done. I do deals with it, and I deliberately turn a blind eye when I find myself wanting to binge on a Netflix show. “It’s only five hours of my life,” I’ll tell myself. Or, “What’s eight more hours? That’s just one hour a night.”

But there are things I will not knowingly enter into, either. Game of Thrones, for example. I will not start something that will take me three days and 16 minutes to finish.

* * *

Recently, I notice time showing up on my face. Lines are appearing, permanent, etched, ever-present. They shock me when I see them in photos, followed by a wave of slightly nauseating horror as I realise that other people can see them all the time. Still, I will not erase them, will not sign up to have a needle injected into my face – much as part of me wants to. I have a sense that I need to practice acceptance, here.

I look back on my twenties with mixed feelings. I might not always do this, but right now, I do. That decade of my life does not mirror what a lot of people in their twenties go through. It was mine and mine alone. But recently, there is a sense of mourning. That time has passed and I’ll never be able to get it back, will never be able to go back and make different choices. What’s done is done. I have a very blessed and privileged life, but I have regrets, too. I know, I know, that I wouldn’t be here if I’d done that time differently – and that era of my life was full of brave choices, and of love, of growth and recovery and marriage and healing. I wrote and danced a lot. I connected extremely deeply with people. But the dissatisfaction I feel about the amount of time I have let slip through my fingers is still here. I know that focusing on the negative isn’t productive, that it doesn’t lead to peace. But I am trying to tell you the truth about what I feel in my life. To tell it without embellishing it. It’s got something to do with success in material terms, with potential, with hard work, with the material and social rewards of hard work. It’s got something to do with the values I chose – very deliberately – to live by in my twenties being permeated, punctuated, penetrated by a different value system, one that prioritises long hours and accolades over simplicity and balance.

In my twenties I chose an unconventional path, but I know that part of the reason I did that is not just because the well-trodden path felt soulless and empty (although it did), but also because I was afraid. I still am. I am afraid of real success, of what it will cost me and take from me and require of me. I am afraid of being drained to the point of emptiness.

I go through the same thought process about motherhood. Lately I’ve been wishing that I’d become a mother younger, before I had wrinkles and before I was nearly forty. Part of me is still on the fence about the whole thing, still unsure about whether I want it, fixating on the fact that if all goes well, Nick and I will be nearly sixty, or older than sixty, by the time our kid is twenty. It feels like – it is – a huge amount of time to commit to an endeavour that you know, even before entering into it, is going to utterly exhaust you. But I want to do it, too. I want us to do it together. I already feel our child’s presence in my life. I already love them. And having Nick’s daughter in my life has shown me that in many ways, the very best in life comes to us through children. I adore that little girl.

* * *

There is so much more I would like to say about this, but as I sit here in Cyprus, look at the gentle rippling of the water on the pool, at the palm leaves dancing in the subtle breeze, as the cicadas make their strange repetitive a-rhythmic percussion – like the wooden ridged instrument you’d run a stick up and down in music class – I can feel that something in me wants to move on, wants to take the thirty or so steps down to the sun lounger by the pool, to cover my body in factor thirty and lie in the shade, wondering if the family of tiny birds will come today to wash themselves at the side of the pool, or whether the dragonflies will make an appearance, and if the pool will stay as quiet as it is right now. There is stillness here, and movement too. Such quiet, punctuated by just enough noise to be interesting but not so much as to be overwhelming, and a pace that is slow enough to notice the aliveness of things.

Time ticks on, as it always does, and my mind keeps whirring, asking what it is I want to do today, and noticing that the answers are the same as they always have been. I want to just be, but I want to do something meaningful, too. I want to find a way to live that feels meaningful and not wasteful. I want to write, and to read, and to rest, and to observe. And I want to know the freedom of not always checking the clock and feeling that mild sense of panic as time creeps inevitably on.

(Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash. Thank you, Aron.)