I’m sat writing this sentence at close to 11pm, eating a bowl of cereal, because I am ravenously hungry and also over-tired. I’ve had a delicious past couple of weeks hanging out in Northumberland with Tabitha and kids, visiting the Lees, celebrating Natalie’s 30th, having Lucy to stay, rejoicing with Elaine + Rosie, and taking trains to Colmar and back to meet and plan with fantastic climate campaigners, even fitting in a stay with Tom and Sasha on the way back. This weekend I’ve had the joys of sunshine, friends, good food and pre-emptive birthday cake.
My heart is full and my brain is processing, which combined with changing bedtimes is, on reflection, a heady concoction known to increase the likelihood of 11pm cereal.
A few weeks ago a colleague shared a photo of her daughter smelling a rose, nose buried in the petals, fully and indelicately. It’s a ridiculous, joyful image which typifies the way that kids seem to effortlessly participate in the present moment. In contrast, I find it easy to end up living somewhere in the future, each event valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else. I live on edge, demanding to know whether the future will conform to my desires for it, waiting to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.
This way of living is, of course, as irrational as it is wildly unsuccessful. You only have to worry about your many train connections, make them all, and then have your final train journey go somewhat haywire, to find this out.
Appropriately (…or should I say… timely?) enough, I’ve just been reading Burkeman’s ‘Four Thousand Weeks‘ which has the apt strap-line ‘time management for mortals’. As a philosophy student in recovery and ashamed time-management obsessive, I’ve been enchanted by the mix of potent existentialism combined with exacting realism. In a chapter entitled ‘Facing Finitude’, Burkeman revisits Heidegger and reminds us that we don’t have a limited amount of time, we are a limited amount of time (ouch!).
Much like staring out into the night’s sky and contemplating the death of stars, where the darkness makes you more alive to the light, holding the possibility of an end can make you more alive to the impossibility of the present happening (Heidegger’s “a world is worlding around us”).
In real terms, this means practicing enjoying-without-possessing. Whatever I might think, I cannot and will not own time; attempting ‘time management’ is a misnomer.
In aid of this new attitude, I’ve invented a therapeutic treatment I call ‘taking poetic refuge’. In the case of time-related maladies such as mine, Martin Wroe’s poem ‘Today is World Day for Being Today’ – which includes the magnificent lines ‘Today is not looking for a partnership / except one with you / Today is not looking for a promotion / Or a corporate identity / And will not be selling off the rights to / This afternoon or this evening’ – becomes instructive.
When sensing the ominous ponderings of whether or not you will make the train connections, or get through the to-do lists which write themselves, you simply inwardly share a wry smile with yourself and tell yourself to pretend that is the ‘World Day for Being Day’.
So far it’s helped me be more happily caught up in the precious moments of munching colin caterpillars on the train, looking up at the clouds, being curled up in bed listening to the thunder and lightning, and going outside to water the hanging baskets. I’d recommend it.
We are splendidly mortal, and today may as well be the World Day for Being Day.
thejoyofrachel 