My father recounts a sunny afternoon in grade school when he returned home breathless and tearful: a traveling, weeklong science fair had just begun at school. When my grandmother Sharon asked him what was wrong, he lamented that he couldn’t possibly attend all the workshops—there simply wouldn’t be enough time. He would have to make the awful decisions himself. I imagine her attempts to suppress laughter and try to take his pain seriously: mothers often know when it’s best to dignify these trifling distresses and impossible heartbreaks.
It may seem contrived for attention, or even caught from adults as a child, but the fear of wasted time and opportunity is second-nature to people like dad and me. I know it as intimately as my tongue knows the contours of every tooth in my mouth, and it is routine as the sensation of fingernails that need clipping. Yet this fear did not have a name until I began to wrap it in language, in my mid-thirties. Only through the benefit of hindsight could I detect its path, looking backward through my first three decades of life. The first true pangs of character-forming regret signaled that some roads branch in only one direction, and cannot be traveled in reverse. Our elders tell us this in their own words, but it does not become real until it first takes up residence in our own middle-aged skin.
The anxiety of becoming
The interminable dance between grief and hope further complicate our relationship with time. After the first major loss of a loved one, we’re unsure how much to reasonably expect from a day, a week, a month, a season, a year. Then, usually sometime in midlife, one becomes aware that the once-interminable decade is nothing. It rings in the air long after the bell has been struck, but it is gone. Where did 10 years go? We feel mostly the same, and only have a vague sense in the mirror that some lines have deepened. We mull on the warnings we have heard, hardly heeded. Surely the regrets of our elders are uniquely theirs, and won’t necessarily become ours?
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
Psalm 90:12
The anxiety of becoming is wrapped up in both time and space. Paradoxically, we fret over these gifts: it is time and space that should be opened, savored, rewrapped, given and received freely. The writer of Psalm 90 pleads, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” suggesting that we would be foolish not to notice the passing of time. Yet, the fear of wasting time often prevents us from making the most it. I have failed (perhaps years at a time!) to live fully in the moment, distracted by past and present, only to find that my body has kept the score of my time travels. Headaches, knots in the stomach and shoulders, even furrows in the brow all record a chronic dissatisfaction with what is, and what has been—never mind the siren song of what may be in the future. John Steinbeck often wrote this vacillation into his characters:
“He always tells what it will be like someday,” Louis threw in.
“Well a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.”
Samuel Hamilton & Louis Lippo, John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” (chapter 13)
Young humans, like animals and sunsets, have a way of bringing us back to the present moment. It can be a rude awakening. Fitting them into our lives, we try for awhile to make them march to the drumbeat we have imposed on Father Time. We forget that there are as many ways to spend or squander a moment as there are grains of sand on the shore. Then, an upturned face, a chubby palm, a bark of anticipation, a wet kiss or a red-gold burst of sun-rays against blue can stop us short. We remember, then, that a moment squandered is often a moment salvaged from total loss to the quicksand of mere expediency.
Here there be dragons
Two of our daughters have faced a visceral dread of boredom—merely another form of the fear of wasted time. This paranoia is worse than that of bedtime monsters ever was. Forgetting that they live in a perpetual garden of delights, where every shelf and blade of grass beckons with possibilities, each child has registered paralyzing terror that she would fail to squeeze the last drop of enjoyment from an afternoon. And afternoons seem to bring it on, most acutely: the time that used to be for napping, and remains for parents to be free of expectations to entertain children, if only for an hour. This is when the fiend boredom stalks and menaces younger minds.
Hot tears and flushed faces accompany roiling words of accusation, as if we have premeditated a sick game of hide-and-seek: “But you never tooooold me I could do such-and-such, and now I’ve been missing out on it this whoooole time!!!” Having learned object permanence long ago, they struggle to remember that they are always awaited by the art supplies, the favorite author, the miniature tools for playing at adulthood, the music instruments, the tessellating STEM toys, the single-player games, the clay and play dough—and always, by the mud, sticks, stones and wheels that can fill hours of unscripted play outdoors.
The age is somewhere between six and nine, when the edge of the map begins to mark the Sea of Boredom, with the inscription “Here there be monsters.” Twice, we have preserved sanity by making a “menu” for the Bored Child, persisting on the refrigerator for months. It has given each girl practice in self-soothing: from the terror of wasting a single moment, and the indignation that the adults will not script every hour of the day with procured novelties. The adults have a choice: exasperation, or lovingkindness. Always, there must be boundaries. To interfere with a child struggling out from the chrysalis of boredom is to doom her never to fly.
O, Wisdom…
Recently, our 8-year-old learned to make paper cranes. She made one from last year’s church calendar, the final week of Advent cresting on its wings, pulsing with with the O Antiphons. These ancient biblical prayers (once sung in Latin) ring with symbols of lordship over time, deliverance from its ravaging effects. They herald time’s return to pure gift, in eternity. The waiting time of Advent is a bell chiming: there is a Wisdom, there is a Key, there is New Growth, there is a Rising Star, there is a Crown presiding over time and space. It is the nature of the enthroned sovereign never to be in a rush, and these days remind us of it. If Advent is the pomp and circumstance building up to Christmastide, the twelve days after December 25, followed by Epiphany on January 6, and Candlemas on February 2, are an unhurried, regal off-ramp down from Christmas revelry.
I have recently begun to keep Candlemas, leaving holiday decorations up until February 2, the feast of Christ’s presentation at the temple, and his mother Mary’s purification rites. It is a time for eating crepes and welcoming another midwinter party—ideally put on by whomever found the baby Jesus in their slice of King Cake on Epiphany. Candles are sometimes made, brought and blessed as reminders of spiritual light.
There is something primal in the way candles have helped us to measure time, long before electricity. A wax taper incarnates for us the reality that we are tempted to “burn the candle at both ends.” It also reminds that life may be snuffed out as easily, leaving behind a seeming waste of stored potential. To be candle-like is to be human: our faces look can waxen, and our hearts melt like wax in moments of shock. (We might even wax poetic, though this meaning comes from Old English “waexen,” to increase or grow, and only connects to the current theme in that we grow eloquent by candlelight.) A candle may be dipped to fullness, trimmed, cooled, and set aside as a tool against darkness of many kinds. So too, the fear of wasted time and opportunity—when blessed and handled carefully—may be converted into wisdom.
There is no repeatable, industrial method for this alchemy: we can only acquiesce to the process. We alternatively snuff out our ambitions or incite our laziness to kindle a spark of action, to regain a sense of the true nature of time and our relationship to it. We trim our wicks, remove the buildup of wax, and wait. John Milton’s autobiographical poem, “On His Blindness,” dictated to his daughter as she recorded it, is the most conclusive word on the subject of time that I can muster, at the moment. I especially enjoy the extended metaphor, and communion with a 17th-century soul who was just beginning to sense the advent of our modern humanity. It is good to remember that we are not alone, that other “human candles” continue to burn brightly for us, even from beyond time.
Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent
by John Milton
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”