Month: September 2014

Time, and a map of what matters

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This September has offered simply spectacular sunsets

September is almost over.  The world spins on.  Aidan and I are coming to the end of this month of the Here Year, whose theme has been time.  Time is perhaps the central preoccupation of my life.  How quickly it moves, how evanescent it is, the confounding nature of memory, the inexorable, unavoidable forward movement of our days: these are the themes around which my thinking and feeling and and writing and living circles.

I hear certain quotes and passages and lines from poems in my head all the time.  I’ve written about that ad nauseum.  It’s hard to say which I think about the most often, but it might be Annie Dillard’s famous sentence:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

I literally could not believe this more fiercely.  Yes, time is a zero sum game.  It is the only one this life actually has.  That’s bracing and often difficult to accept.  At least for me.  But I also have some good news: you can choose what to do with the time you have.  YES, I know: there are many things we HAVE to do that we might not choose.  Work is a big one.  I know.  I work full time.  There are many things I love about my job but it definitely contributes to the fact that on a near-daily basis I wish I had more time for my family, for my writing, for sleep, for myself.

When I look at a map of a week I see a lot of hours dedicated to work, and you might challenge my assertion here, saying “is that something you really value?” The answer would be yes.  I value contributing to my family economically, I like my work and colleagues, and it’s important to me to show Grace and Whit that I have something I enjoy doing to which my training and education contributed.  And the other hours?  They are mine.  Are there things I have to do in there?  Yes. Do I spend more time driving to and from practices than I want?  Sure.  But that reflects a value that I want to do that with Grace and Whit.  Do I spend more time doing laundry and packing lunches than I want?  Sure.  But that is a way for me to stay intimately involved in the details of my family’s life, and for me, that’s worth it.

How I spend my time tells me what I value.

Anne Lamott says that “it is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day,” and this is true, too.  How do we spend this wealth?  Let’s be deliberate and thoughtful about that.  Honestly, that is all I want.

Every hour of our life is a choice, a trade-off between competing priorities and desires.  We are all given the same number of hours in a day.  What do you prioritize?  What do you care about?  Where are you spending your time?In the last several years my own life has simultaneously narrowed and widened.  It has narrowed because I have substantially cut down on external (non-job and non-family) commitments.   I say no much more often than I say yes.  And even beyond commitments about my physical presence, I’ve withdrawn in a real way: for example, I spend much less time on the phone catching up with friends.But even in this narrowing my life has startled me with an unforseen richness.  It’s like I stepped into a dense forest but then I looked up to see an enormous expanse of the sky.  Somehow, in my turning inward, I have learned to see the glittering expanse of my own life.  Maybe it is not having the other distractions.  Maybe it is that is training my gaze I have opened my heart.  I am not sure.I spend my time with my family, I spend my time writing, I spend my time reading, I spend my time with a small number of people I entirely trust and wholly love.  I run at 5:30 in the morning because that’s the only time when the trade-off isn’t too steep for me.  It is very rare for me to have dinner, drinks, or lunch with a friend one-on-one.  The same is true for Matt and me with other couples.  On the other hand there are many evenings where I sit and read to the kids while they are in the tub, when I get into bed at 8:15pm with a book, and there are a great many days full of work.

Let’s all decide to no longer hide behind the excuse that we “don’t have time.”  The truer response would be “I don’t care enough to really protect the time.”  This may be harsh, but I think it’s also true.  Let’s take ownership of our choices rather than bemoaning their results.  Do you want time to meditate?  Time to go to yoga?  Time to spend reading with your children?  Well, something else has to go.  As I keep saying, time is zero-sum.

Think long and hard about how you spend your precious hours, the only currency in this life that I personally think is actually worth anything.  A lot of these decisions are made instinctively, without deliberate thought or analysis.  But that’s how life is, isn’t it?  We know what we care most deeply about, and we run towards it, chins ducked.  We protect fiercely time for those things and people and events we truly value.  And those things, people, events we never seem to have time for?  Well, that tell us something important too.

We each populate our hours differently, and our days, weeks, months, and years, are maps of what matters to us.  Look closely at yours.  Do you like what you see?

Parts of this post were written several years ago. Every word is still true.

 

You must travel it by yourself

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.

-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I found these beautiful lines in Sukey Forbes’ heart-wrenching and life-affirming memoir, The Angel in My Pocket.

My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends

 

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It was a great honor to have my work included in Stephanie Sprenger and Jessica Smock’s first anthology, The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship.  Friendship is an important subject to me (as evidence, my archives for that topic), and I loved the book, which touched on so many facets of female friendship.

Stephanie and Jessica have just published their second book, My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Losing and Leaving Friends, which is focused on one particularly complicated, thorny, and emotional of these facets.  The book unpacks the myriad experiences of friendship’s end.

These paragraphs, from Jessica Smock’s introduction to the book, provide a succinct and compelling summary of the project’s important goal:

“There is so much good, so much power, so much love, in female friendships. But there is also a dark side of pain and loss. And surrounding that dark side, there is often silence. Women feel that there is no language to talk about their feelings. There is shame, the haunting feeling that the loss of a friendship is a reflection of our own worth or capacity to be loved.

This book, we hope, is a step toward breaking that silence. We as women need to recognize the scars of lost friendships and make it okay to talk about them. And we must also teach our daughters how to manage conflict and emotion without resorting to these forms of indirect aggression that cause deep pain with no visible wounds. The life cycle is long, and many friendships will not last. Yet the end of something once powerful and important will bring sadness and grief, feelings that deserve to be acknowledged.”

I think the experience of losing a close friendship is a universal one.  I’ve certainly been through it.  I’ve felt deep heartache, profound guilt, and lingering loss that has stayed with me for a long, long time.  My female friendshpis are vitally important to me and the few occasions that I’ve seen one die have caused me real pain.

I love, too, what Jessica says too about helping our daughters develop the tools to both navigate friendships (many do not, in my opinion, need to end) and to honor their loss if it happens.  To celebrate the importance and life-enhancing value of female friendship while acknowledging that not all relationships last a lifetime.  I hope you will check out My Other Ex, which is full of richly layered and beautifully told personal stories.

I’m also happy to share that Jessica and Stephanie’s next collaboration is a book called Mothering Through the Darkness: Stories of Postpartum Struggle.  They are open for submissions through December 1 and I hope some of you will consider sharing a story.  Postpartum struggle (what a wonderful way to describe what can be a kaleidoscope of experiences) is a topic very dear to my heart, and I’m really excited to read this next book.  I’m also hugely honored that Jessica and Stephanie asked me to join an esteemed panel of judges for the submissions.

The telling power of shelves

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The first thing I do when I’m in someone home for the first time (or even not for the first time) is look at their bookshelves.  I can spend a long, long (probably a socially-unacceptably long) amount of time browsing the books they keep, display, and, presumably, love.  I think there is a tremendous amount we can learn from others by what books they have in their living rooms.

It’s connected to this belief, I think, that I love the rise of the shelfie.  I’ve shared a few of my own, recently and last summer (my Woolf and thesis section, and my poetry shelf).  I’ve captured the bookshelves at my parents’ house on the shore.  I have many, many more bookshelves to photograph and suspect I’ll keep doing that.  I’m often charmed by the random assortments of books that wind up together on a shelf.

Last year we had our first floor repainted and as part of that project I had to empty out our built-in bookcase and then reassemble it.  It was great fun to revisit all those books, and to decide who should sit next to whom on the shelf.  Ann Lamott next to Annie Dillard.  Classics all lined up together, their broken-in spines speaking of how carefully I read them way back in college.  A small section of anthologies I’ve had work published in.

I think often of the famous Cicero quote that  “a room without books is like a body without a soul.”  I agree entirely.  I read hard-copy books and always have, but I watch the world shifting slowly but irrevocably towards e-readers around me.  One of the primary questions I have about this is what will people put in their bookshelves, in a world without paper books?  Another quote comes to mind, this one Anna Quindlen’s: “I would be most content if my children grew up ot be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”  On this dimension I know I would please Quindlen greatly.  I come by it honestly: my childhood was spent tripping over stacks of books and to this day my father likes to crack that “home is where you keep the books.”  A fun family outing for us is a trip to a used bookstore.

For now, I’m sticking with paper.  And I’m still, endlessly fascinated by looking at bookshelves, in my house and in those of others.  What are some of your favorite bookshelves?

 

Little daily miracles

I read a lot this summer.  I re-read some, too.  One book I picked up again for the first time in years was To the Lighthouse.  It was my copy from college, and I loved seeing the underlining.  So many passages jumped out at me, then and now.

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

…she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

…there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glance at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest.  Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…

Was there no safety?  No learning by heart the ways of the world?  No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?  Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?