Tag: time

Walking. With Spyro.

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Slept terribly again last night. What’s new!? I plugged in Helen Garner’s last diary in her trilogy and listened until I finally dropped off. My last recollection was her voice whispering: “In fifteen minutes I’ll be thirty-nine years old.” Her words echoing…in 15 minutes, I’ll be…in 15 minutes, I’ll be…in 15 minutes, I’ll be….

Jan Grue: “But the days slip by at an uncomfortable speed.”

Christian Wiman: “Time, that great grinding wheel of the world rolls over you…too eroded to notice.“

I walk.

The World feels like it has rolled over me, and then back again. Heavy step, heavy shoulders, heavy backpack, just all Heavy. And, Tired. Of this same track. Same trees. Same hut. Just more of the Same.

It’s now been 1,268 consecutive (almost) morning walks at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

I’m about to turn back – HAD ENOUGH – and I see them in the distance. And here they come.

Think Pegasus without the wings. This dog could fly. How many times have I seen these two on this track? Go introduce yourself! Go say hello! Do it!

Continue reading “Walking. With Spyro.” →

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

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I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time.

We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us.

So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us.

​I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.”

— Ursula K. LeGuin, Interview by Heather Davis. “Stories from wide open, wild country: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin” Hobo Magazine 16: 130-131. (2014)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Come back to earth…

dwell on the shortness of life.

Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about

how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost imperceptible breeze.

— Jim Harrison, from “Cold Poem” in “Saving Daylight.”

Note:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. January 26, 2023. 6:35 a.m.
  • Poem: Thank you Whiskey River
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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“Why can’t people see the good things in front of them?”

“They think they have time for it later.”

— List (2011) (via CinemaBravo)

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Instead of trying to clear the decks, reach inbox zero or check every errand off your to-do list, acknowledge that you lack time for even a fraction of the things you want or need to do. Learn to tolerate the feeling—sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes anxiety-provoking—of having a lot clamoring for your attention, he says. And then: “Do the most important things.”

What those important things actually are has grown clearer, one silver lining of the turbulence of the past two years—war, gun violence, the virus. Joe Holt, a business professor at the University of Notre Dame and former Jesuit priest who splits his time between South Bend, Ind., and the Chicago suburbs, spent parts of 2020 and 2021 volunteering in an intensive-care unit as a nurse’s aide.

“They make me relish time,” he says of his days assisting patients suffering from Covid. He delights in tiny things: the ability to get out of bed, to walk in the sunshine. Never a big planner, he’s started setting goals, like completing an Ironman triathlon.

“Part of it is, my body is working right now and who knows if it will be in a year or two,” he says. “I’m more deliberate and determined when it comes to things like that.”

It can still be hard to know what to say no to and what to prioritize. Procrastination and decision fatigue kick in. Try to imagine what choice you’d approve of in a year or decade, recommends Alan Burdick, the author of a book about the biology and psychology of time.

Time is weird, amorphous and elastic, he says, with the ability to speed up or slow down depending on everything from how much we like something to how busy we are. At its core, he says, time is really about memory and what you’ll take with you after the seconds have passed…

“It was in the quiet…that I figured out how to reprioritize my time.”

—  Rachel Feintzeig, You Have Only So Much Time. Are You Using It Right ‘When you do the math, it really hits.’ After two life-changing years, decisions about how we spend our hours feel even weightier (The Wall Street Journal June 13, 2022)