Time

A few weeks ago Karen at An Artist's Garden blogged about time: not having enough of it, finding it all used up on some of the things she loves while other things she wants to do are forgotten and undone.  Judging from the number of comments made, she struck a chord with a lot of us.  

I have always been obsessed with time.  I remember as a teenager reading Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress"

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk,and pass our long love's day;

Thou by the Indian Ganges'side

Shouldst rubies find;

I by the tide Of Humber would complain.

I would Love you ten years before the Flood;

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow.

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear 

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long preserv'd virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like am'rous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.

Let us roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

It made me shiver.  I felt a delight in the words - the vastness of the vegetable love which for some reason I always saw as a huge cauliflower, the tearing of pleasures through the iron gates of life - shivered over with a ferocious and crushing sense of how brief life is.  The sardonic young man who had pressed his lover with the deliciously cruel couplet:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

was himself dead.  Everything passes in the blink of an eye.  This life that I was standing on the threshold of was so brief as to be practically meaningless.

It didn't last, that trembling sensation.  I don't suppose it could have done without driving me nuts.  Life got in the way.  It speeded up and opened out like a river full of sailing boats when I went to university.  It slowed down to a crawl when my children were small and then the years whirled by in a flurry of work and childcare.  Now that the particular feverishness of that juggling is behind me I find increasingly that I do have again that tremulous awareness of how little time there is.  You can't look it full in the face.  It would strike you blind with fear, like the basilisk.  But you can feel it, as Marvell did, at your back, breathing coldly on your neck.  

Perhaps it is getting older that causes this, when the life to come is so clearly so much shorter than the life which has already gone.

Perhaps it is a leftover from when I was ill a few years ago and briefly looked at the prospect of stopping living, stopping when I was so far from ready.  Perhaps it comes from the impact of my brother's stroke and now my father's illness, making me so acutely aware of what they can no longer do and will not be able to do again.  Whatever it is I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with the time I have, perhaps not the most productive use of it!

I admire very much the way in which my aged FIL can take whatever pleasure each day provides for him, even though each day is much the same with its mealtimes and its walk and its television, a measured routine which he loves.  Yet that same routine can make me feel that my own life is running away through my fingers, one day so like the last that time speeds up and the weeks whirl past like scenes from a speeding car.  But I don't want a "bucket list" - thirty places to see before you die, fifty restaurants to eat in, ten great novels to read.  That really is not how I work.  When I see friends with more freedom to travel than we have at the moment I don't feel any overwhelming envy of them.  There is the odd pang.  I long to go back to see New Zealand.  I would like to visit friends in British Columbia.  Both of those may happen sometime.  But mostly I am very aware of how fortunate I am to live with people I love in a place that I love and to have the luxury of choosing when and where I work doing something I enjoy.  I love my family and see them often, considering that none of them live nearby.  I love my friends, and see them not often enough.  I love my garden but it would take all the time I could give it and still need more.  I love learning my Welsh but don't do enough of it.  Is there room in my overcrowded life for more of anything or do I need less of something?

What would I regret if I did not do it might be the question I suppose.  It helped me to come to the decision to leave my previous job a couple of years ago.  It wasn't that I didn't like my job, in many ways I loved it, but I knew that if I had only five or ten years left I did not want to have spent them doing more of the same.  I wanted to spend them with the people I love, doing things that I love.  I wanted to have time to make a garden, to make cakes with small children, to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by or drink a glass of wine in the sun with a friend.  Ah that is it.  Writing it down makes me see.  I need to do more idling, both here and away from home I need to do a little less doing and a little more just being.  That is what I need to do with some of my time.  Be.