How do you chase time if it doesn’t exist?
I’m trying to “be present”
I once sent a someone a photo of a sunset for them to reply, “Do you ever get tired of it?” I didn’t understand the question, really. Tired of a sunset?
I do watch a lot of sunsets. I’ve raced down medina streets, scrambled over seaweed-slick rocks, and drove down unnamed gravel roads to catch a good one. Sunsets are a curtain, a moment, a chance to breathe. It is the easiest time of day to be still and to be grateful. Lucky to be awash in color, and cricket cheers or winter winds. It’s near impossible not to be anything but wholly present when watching the sun set.
I am always thinking about being present (or more specifically about time in general), but never more so than lately. My mind’s been playing past conversations on a constant loop. Trying to mark the points where my reading of situations was miles off. Diagramming in curlicues all the ways that I got lost. And when I’m not obsessing over echos, I’m trapped in a lost future. Plans drawn in ink turned out to be pencil which turned into smudged fingerprints.
I think that I’m having so much trouble being present because the present is so overwhelming. We’re living this time that is constantly hammering small cracks into your heart and leaving no room to repair them. So we’re just building up these fractures and they’re spreading like a delta as we get more and more brittle. And then one big thing (honestly does it even have to be that big?) comes along and splinters you to pieces. And you think, “Ok this is it, those are the smallest pieces I can break into, now I get to heal.” But you don’t actually. Because new cracks keep coming quicker than you can repair.
In an effort to shake myself of a haunted future, I keep asking myself what I want. But I’m having such a difficult time imagining the possibilities. I’ve been in this place before — so overwhelmed by the vast uncertainty of the future that I’m just frozen in place. I’m 28. Which is young. But it also doesn’t feel so young anymore. My friends have wedding rings, babies, houses, big professional dreams and lives that look like they have direction.
I don’t know what I want from the future. Or maybe I do and it just feels so impossible that I can’t even say it out loud. It feels like asking for way too much and risking humiliation when I fail. In a world in which I get everything I want, I want a little house, and a big garden, both constantly full of neighbors and friends. I want weekends where nieces and nephews flock to learn about plants and bees. I want art on every wall and a tea kettle running. I want weeks with far-away friends at the beach, in the Rockies, under the Wadi Rum stars. I want sunsets.
Mostly, what I really want, is just to never be alone.
And I don’t know what that means, honestly. Or how to make it real. Am I ok, alone in a house, as long as I have friends nearby? As friends get busier in their own lives, will I lose them? Do I need to stop ghosting everyone on dating apps? If I don’t, won’t they just leave eventually anyway?
I’m not alone now. My life is full of love. My support system an incredible feat of transcontinental engineering. But I feel like if I don’t plan for the future, then one day it will be here and I’ll be miserable. But is a future that is not born of present joy even one worth striving for? I work in climate change. I don’t think we’re doomed. But I do think that the future is far riskier than we might imagine. I do think that nothing is guaranteed but the present moment. So why am I so wrapped up in everything that isn’t now? Despite all the exhausting realities of the present, there is joy here, but I keep brushing it aside.
Caught in this spiral, I’ve been consciously trying to think about time differently. I keep running into things that call into question its essence as a concrete, linear thing that might guide my life.
Some months ago, I listened to an interview with Carlo Rovelli, a physicist who notes that there is no evidence that past, present and future exist at all. This led to me, at a rooftop bar at birthday drinks for a person I didn’t know in a town that wasn’t mine shouting, “If past, present and future don’t exist, why I was a baby and now I’m an adult?” In the car ride home, my brilliant friend with a background in physics tried to diagram it on the center console, it made sense at the time. But my memory fails me, and it’s lost to a non-existent past.
More recently, I’ve been listening to Braiding Sweetgrass on audiobook. I light a pumpkin-apple candle, dim my lights and knit while author Robin Wall Kimmerer reads. It is an attempt at being present, but I still find myself pulled toward things that are no longer here and never will be. Last night, in the midst of this attempt at presence, it was as if Kimmerer could hear my worries. She read:
“Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanaboozhoo’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river, running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself — its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again...If time is a turning circle, there’s a place where history and prophecy converge. The footprints of first man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”
What would it mean for my small, everyday life, if I reimagined time to be the whole sea? Would I be easier on myself when I turn the same biting phrase over in my mind for the 500th time this week? Would I accept that the future is here, has been here, and that nothing is ever truly lost? Would I be happier? I’m not sure. But maybe it’s worth a try?
Tonight I watched the sunset from the freeway. I’d hoped to make it to my favorite park in time to watch the sun dip below the trees. But there was a pickup truck on its side in the intersection. And I was late.
