On the nature of time

before you know it, everything will change

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. How there’s so much of it now and not nearly enough. This is the rhythm of winter, right?

“Text them to see if they are here yet,” I say, while adjusting my knit hat on my head and simultaneously looping the straps of my mask around my ears. My spouse Janyce is sitting in the driver’s seat of the car looking out the front windshield, her hands held over the heat vent, staring out onto the winter expanse of the estate grounds.

“They are here already and staying warm in the car at the front of the parking lot,” she says, now looking down at her phone.

“You ready?” I say, as I open the car door to the blast of 20 degrees hitting my exposed forehead and my thinly clad knees in stretch leggings under my winter coat.

A few weeks ago, I bought us four tickets to see the trees all lit up at a Trustees of the Reservation a mere half-hour drive down the highway.

“Dad and I are not coming. Too cold. We’re old,” read the text from my mom this morning.

I sent her back a frowny face emoji but didn’t argue. I knew I’d have another chance to say goodbye before they drove back to Florida, my mind already racing ahead to consider who might be close enough to take the extra tickets.

“You still want to go?” I said to Janyce while she was in the back hallway wiping off the dog’s paws before heading back to her downstairs office.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

The other day, I lingered over a New Yorker photo essay by artist Deanna Dikeman called “Leaving and Waving.” In the series, she photographs her retired parents over several decades standing in front of their downsized home waving goodbye to her after each visit. It’s one of those poignant portrayals that makes you smile even as it unsettles you to your core as you study all the mundane details —her parents with their arms around each other, her mom in a sweater, her dad wearing an unwavering silly grin year after year. You watch them age and get more wrinkles. Her dad starts to use a four-pronged cane. Eventually, it’s just the mom standing in front of the garage alone, then waving from a chair in a nursing home, until finally the photo is a closed garage door and an empty driveway.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. How there’s so much of it now and not nearly enough. This is the rhythm of winter, right?

I can spend a whole afternoon watching the shadows of the waning sun move across the wall until I glance at the digital numbers of the Fitbit on my wrist to see that it’s suddenly, inexplicably 3:30pm. By 4:00pm it will be dark outside. Maybe it’s because I have barely moved from the same room all day, day after day, that the enveloping darkness in the house seems to erase any novel options for the evening. Well, there’s dinner to make and the dishes to do, I can pick up one of my books, or we can watch a movie. By 8pm it’s just easiest to go to bed.

We now greet our friends with a hearty wave standing outside their car and waiting for them to get out and shake around in the arctic air. The four of us race ahead, hopping up and down to stay warm, and follow the lit path until we hit the hot chocolate booth. Up ahead, the bushes are festooned in colorful lights and the walkway is rigged with piped-in holiday music and planned stops for snapping Instagram photos. Once we turn away from the open field and enter the woods, everything seems to slow way down again.

“You know, those hanging orbs look a little like the coronavirus, don’t you think?” says Janyce.

“Look over there” I say. “It’s like a fairy forest!” Tiny green spots twinkle over the bare tree branches, all the way up to where they meet the sky. It’s otherworldly, ethereal, shimmering. The four of us slow our walking pace to “oooh and ahhh” as if we are watching a fireworks display on the fourth of July. And there it is again, that weird elastic feeling I sometimes get when I notice that time has slipped away out of nowhere.

I read recently about a scientific idea called “moving spotlight theory,” which argues that there is no single objective past, present, or future —only one absolute present. It’s kind of like the way a Buddhist master might describe it, I think. Except that this theory attempts to go further and explain the nature of how time passes and how things change, “as if a spotlight is moving over it.”

To me, everything depends on where you are in your life, how fast or slow you are moving, and what you are afraid to lose. We’re so close to getting out of this pandemic with a vaccine on the horizon, and yet so far still with another dark winter season.

“Is that it? We’re done already?” says Janyce.

“Wow, you’re right, I feel like we just got here,” I say.

“I’m just happy we had a reason to leave the house,” says my friend. “Thank you for inviting us!”

I take a last look back to snap one more photo of the holiday spotlights illuminating the trees, take a deep breath, and join Janyce back at the car.

“That was worth doing,” I say.

“You’re right, it was,” she says. “Now get in the car, I’m freezing.”

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