My wife is part of a writing club. Sometimes she shares the prompts with me, and even sometimeser I write something based on them (though I am generally watching our kids while she participates in the conviviality of the club without me). This month’s prompt was about time, so I wrote this.
Physicists tell us that time is part of the fabric of space. Passage in time is relative to movement in space. Neuroscientists tell us the perception of time is altered by the brain. Intense focus, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow, makes hours pass like minutes. Adrenaline slows the feeling of time’s passage. If you have ever had a near death experience you know the extreme end of this. Hydroplaning from the middle of a busy six-lane highway to the median must have taken a few seconds, but in my memory I can replay it frame by frame in slow motion. It’s as if, sensing an imminent end, you squeeze the most possible awareness of the final moments of life.
Philosophers of time (there of course are such people) speak of time as a relationship. Events are points. Our current position is defined by the ones that have passed. Once a point is passed it cannot be un-passed. You are forever changed in relation to it.
Changes in this relationship can be welcomed or accepted haltingly. The speaker in Wendell Berry’s poem, “A meeting,” dreams of seeing a dead friend. The friend “has gone long and far / and yet he is the same.” He has ceased passing points in time and his relationship to them is fixed. Seeing his sameness the “living one” realizes, with perhaps a twinge of regret, the extent of his change: “grown strange to what I once was.” The same theme is taken up in another of Berry’s poems, “Leaving.” In the inner voice of the dying, this poem realizes that even in the moments of departure a loved one “remain[s] / on the earth we knew, already changing / into the earth you know.” To live is to change.
The actual past is fixed of course—like the dead, it does not change—but our relationship to it is interpreted. Like history, it is written and rewritten. New experiences shed light on old, memories fade and often sweeten. Certain storylines reach their conclusion and we reinterpret earlier events. That our lives contain “storylines” shows what a coagulation our memory exerts on the viscous mass of life events.
If regret is the primary negative emotion of the past its temporal opposite is anxiety. It is easy to worry about those things yet to pass. Memory is filled with the unusual and extraordinary. We expect that the future will be made of similar events. Regular days don’t make much dent in our recollection, but they will be the lion’s share of the future. On any given day you will probably not do anything remembered at the end of life, much less in a year. Surely some future days will be extraordinary, some will be evil, but most will be normal.
What to do then with this past that plagues us, the unknowable future, and the often boring present? This brings us to the best advice I have ever heard. It comes from an interview with the Irish poet David Whyte: “The only way to change the past is the quality of attention we give to the present.”
This statement can save us from looking too much back and too far ahead. Doing either diminishes our ability to render the unknowable future into a meaningful past. Attention of a good quality takes our moments and our days and folds them into the story of our lives.