Alexandersmap

    Tag: Tempus Fugit

    • Extending the Joyride

      “Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.” — Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri (Thoughts)

      Leopardi wrote this in his latter years, with understanding of the sufferings of old age. As his work goes, Pensieri was published unfinished. We all leave something unfinished when we leave this life. If our legacy is what we leave behind us, our unfulfilled potential is all that we never got around to. Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” is knowing the gap exists between the two.

      I’m one of those people who say to the world that I will live to be 100. I know the statement is foolhardy, brash and unrealistic. It’s said tongue-in-cheek, like many things I say. We simply don’t know when our expiration date is. Given the rate of decline in our latter years that I’ve observed in the generations ahead of mine, I aspire only for good health and sound mind for as long as possible, that I may kick the sufferings of old age down the curb right to the end of this joyride.

      Each day we wrestle with fear and desire. The trick to aging gracefully is to focus on filling those gaps in our potential with applied experience. We produce and share and move on to the next stage of our lives to the end of our days. If our health span allows, we may expand our legacy. So above all else, it seems, focus on increasing that health span. Fitness and mental acuity are far better desires than simply growing old.

    • Every Passing Moment

      As wave is driven by wave
      And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
      So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
      Always, for ever and new. What was before
      Is left behind; what never was is now;
      And every passing moment is renewed.
      — Ovid, Metamorphoses      , Book XV

      We are forever transformed by what was. If we take this to be true, then it follows that what will be will be realized because of what we do now. Our lives are thus reinvented one day to the next, right to the end of our days. We may choose to do something with each precious moment to ensure tomorrow renews with promise, or concede our agency to fate and the whim of others.

      Each week passes by more quickly than the last. Seven days feel like three, four weeks feel like two. So what do the years feel like? Shockingly brief time capsules marking each stage of life before the next wave is upon us. Tempus fugit. Our awareness of this rapid flip through days naturally leaves us feeling like we’re forever behind, trying to grasp the moments as they fly past. To seize what flees, as Seneca put it.

      The answer isn’t to try to cram more into our moments, but to savor what we’re doing as it’s happening. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested approaching everything, even something as mundane as washing dishes, with mindfulness, that we may process our time more fully. This is it, such that it is. So what does it feel like? What are we making of it? Where will it take us from here?

      It’s easy to meditate in the garden or even while washing the dishes. It’s harder to sit in traffic and accept the minutes turning to hours. Each situation presents an opportunity to be fully aware, fully awake, fully alive. We are all works in progress, wave after wave, surfing through time. What is this moment teaching us about our place in it? What does it offer for the moments to come?

      Whenever I tell myself to stop writing this blog and use the time for other things, I’m struck by two thoughts. First, I’m a streak-based creature of habit, and I’m not inclined to break this streak just yet. But more to the point, writing is my particular way of processing each wave, for ever and new. I gently place this post in my timeline and face the next wave as it rises before me. The days and weeks and years fly by, marked thusly, for anyone inclined to follow along (I really wanted to use the word thusly in today’s blog, and there it is).

      This post will be longer than the norm. Maybe I just don’t want to say farewell to our moment together. But the next wave is rising, and we each must bring our attention to each passing moment as it renews before us. And here it is! So thank you for this time. We both know just how precious it is.

    • Life and Love and Wings

      i thank You God for most this amazing
      day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
      and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
      which is natural which is infinite which is yes

      (i who have died am alive again today,
      and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
      day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
      great happening illimitably earth)

      how should tasting touching hearing seeing
      breathing any—lifted from the no
      of all nothing—human merely being
      doubt unimaginable You?

      (now the ears of my ears awake and
      now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

      — E. E. Cummings, i thank You God for this amazing

      We dwell so often on our limitations; Limited time, limited capacity for learning new things or for being patient with the things in our life that overstay their welcome. We are bound by commitments, with reasons, with a lack of imagination for breaking free from all of that and living an expansive life. We are locked into routine and measure our days incrementally. How are we to grow when we are forever held captive by a lack of audace créatrice (creative audacity)?

      To be unbounded and unlimited is of course a fantasy. We all will die one day (memento mori). Infinite growth is not for mere mortals. And yet we may live a far more expansive life than we mortals usually attempt. We are no more and no less than what we do with our time.

      Why worry about all that today when we can simply do what must be done and defer hopes and dreams indefinitely? Because now is all we have. Growing into our possibility begins now. It always has and always will be so. But thinking in terms like “always” is its own trap. Because it lets us off the hook of immediacy. We must steer clear of such traps and simply think of now. For this is the birth day of life and of love and wings. So do begin.

    • Third Things

      “Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.” — John Hall, The Third Thing

      We have our self, we have our selves, and we have what we are mutually focused on in our time together. Like being on teams, whether sports or companies or projects worked on with mutual focus and effort, that thing we focus on together becomes a link that bonds us in the moment and forever after. A long-term relationship is simply coexisting with someone else with mutual attention on a series of third things we carry with us for the rest of our days.

      Our hiking friends have the mountains and expanding red lines on trail maps as their third thing. Our sailing friends scheme of bigger boats and tropical anchorages. Our lake friends are quietly carving out a life as snowbirds and the idea of growing old in a forever summer lifestyle. My sister and brother-in-law have found pickleball a useful third thing bringing them fitness and an expansive social life. We’re all different, and so too are the things we give our lives to in mutual focus.

      Third things capture a time in our life that we’ll remember one day when the math is no longer one plus one plus one more thing. We may be aware of such things as subtraction without dwelling on it. We all know the score. For it’s a thing too. Sha-la, la-la-la-la, live for today…

      What do we—together—focus on other than ourselves? The list comes easily at times. The frisbee-loving pup. The house and whatever the latest project is that my bride has deemed essential to our well-being. Always, the children, then aspiring student-athletes, now adults. Increasingly, the parents, and all that aging parents mean for them… and for us. Travel and collecting experiences once deferred for other third things. Third things are our common ground, focused on together yet differently. A part of us, yet not us.

    • Do Your Thing

      “I myself think that the wise man meddles little or not at all in affairs and does his own things.” — Chrysippus

      We have a serious issue on our hands. There is simply not enough time today to do all that we might do. Spending time on anything is serious business when we recognize how little of it we have left to spend.

      Knowing that time is our precious currency in a brief life, why do we carelessly toss it away on things beyond our control? The affairs of others is not our concern when those affairs are beyond our control. We ought to use this time more wisely, lest we fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Hum the tune, but hear the message.

      Just look at how we burn through this very time thinking too much about how to use it. That’s the philosopher’s curse. To be or not to be, that really is the question. But remember to be now, for there is no later. So stop thinking so much and do your thing. Tomorrow will be far too late in the game for such things.

    • Shake the Grass

      And the days are not full enough
      And the nights are not full enough
      And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass.
      — Ezra Pound

      There is a compulsion to fill my days and nights with experience. Perhaps you share this too. There is an equally pressing sense that time is slipping past us at shocking speed. Tempus fugit. We humans are bound to notice it eventually.

      Forever chasing experience. Forever working to be here, now. It’s a blessing and a curse to be aware. Mostly a blessing, for awareness offers a glimpse of all that flies past. Awareness locks a few moments in amber, that we may cherish them for the rest of our vibrant days. Awareness makes us do things like getting out of a warm bed at 3 AM to attempt a glimpse at the northern lights, or to plunge into a cold mountain stream or the bay late in the season—simply because we may never pass this way again.

      Don’t waste a moment. We ought to spend the time as we know we should. We ought to avoid distraction and waste whenever possible. And be bold and daring when we least expect it of ourselves. Shake the grass and dance all night. For today will fly by like all the rest.

    • The Slow and Difficult Trick of Living

      It isn’t very far as highways lie.
      I might be back by nightfall, having seen
      The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
      Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
      They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
      How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

      Many have gone, and think me half a fool.
      To miss a day away in the cool country.
      Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
      Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
      As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
      Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
      — Mary Oliver, Going to Walden

      It isn’t very far at all for me to visit Walden. I could be there in about an hour, accounting for rush hour traffic in that general direction. I’ve gone there before, just to be there on some random Tuesday or Wednesday or whatnot. While others worked I would play hooky for an hour or two, just to see the water, just to feel like Thoreau in the interlude between responsibilities. Inevitably I’d return better for having been there. Some might argue that my nose to the grindstone for those couple of hours would have been a better use of the time. Let them think what they want. We’re all different people, aren’t we?

      I can feel that it’s almost time to re-read Walden again, just as I felt today it was time to revisit Mary Oliver. There are other voices beyond the hustle culture that ought to be listened to. There are other ways to spend our precious time. The trick to living is awareness and presence in the invaluable now. To learn and grow and become at a pace that we can maintain for the long haul, even as we know that the time slips away so very quickly.

      You won’t find me at Walden today. I assure you it will be just fine without me. For a Monday I ought to be in more of a rush somewhere, but what is on the other side of that hustle? Just what do we arrive at when we go from here to there anyway? Maybe that’s why I keep writing—to remind myself to be aware of the time going by, or to simply remind myself to cherish the view along the way. To be here, now feels like more than enough. Why would we ever rush away from it?

    • Proof of Identity

      “I think motivation is complete garbage. It’s never there when you need it. And that’s the paradox of it. [It’s] that we’re all sitting there waiting to be motivated and it’s not coming. Because basic wiring of the brain is that you will always default to what’s easy. And you always push against what’s hard. And if motivation were available on demand we’d all have a million dollars and six-pack abs. And so sitting around and waiting for motivation is the kiss of death. Because it’s in the action that you dissipate the emotion, and it’s in the action that you actually prove to yourself through the action, ’cause you see yourself operating differently, that you are a different person, that you are not defined by your emotions.” — Mel Robbins, from A Bit of Optimism Episode 157 interview

      Two days ago I took all the comfortable habits acquired during the holidays and I threw them in the dumpster. For me, New Year’s resolutions are an artificial timeline that hits too abruptly after the holidays. The decorations are still up, how can we possibly mentally declare we’re on to something new yet? But wait a week or a month, see where we are and where we want to get to and simply begin. Decide what to be and go be it.

      The trick is in that waiting. We must act at some point if we’re going to do anything in this life. I waited because of business travel that would have made everything I expected to do to realize my plan impossible. I began because I saw the runway ahead and knew I was clear for takeoff. The implications are clear; we must be committed to the decisions we make and back them up with action immediately to reinforce the new identity we aspire to reach.

      There is a person in my life who doesn’t like when I use the word must in this blog—as if I’m commanding them to do what I write. I would suggest that we each have agency over ourselves or we don’t, and my use of a word does not translate into a demand for someone else’s action. Simply a demand for my own. Initiative begins within. So what is that voice within telling us? Act on that.

      Where do we want to be tomorrow? Where do we want to be in three months or at the end of this calendar year? Begin with the end in mind, establish and commit to a plan and do the work necessary to execute on that plan. If that sounds too business-like a sentence, so be it. We are in the business of life-optimization, and we must (there’s that word again) not wait, we must act now!

      Realize that the year will fly by like all the rest (Tempus fugit). Realize that there will always be something or someone that will pull us away from what we aspire to be. Action is the only proof of identity. Just what will we realize this year? Go be it.

    • A More Available Life

      “The more you move, the more available you are to chance and little wonders.” — Douglas Westerbeke, A Short Walk Through A Wide World

      To be open to experience is risky. Openness requires more of us than to simply stay in place, doing what we’ve always done, in this familiar way that we’ve always done it. That sentence either sounds like comfort to us or a death sentence, depending on who we have grown to be.

      Westerbeke’s novel is a page-turning wonder itself, as its hero moves through the world. For those of us with travel lust, it stirs those familiar feelings. To leave all of this and go find out more about that, whatever and wherever that is. In experiencing that, we learn a lot about who we are in the process. We are moving beyond the self in such moments. We are living a more available life.

      It sounds wonderful to be forever traveling, forever moving from place to place, as if we’d die if we stayed too long in any one place. In reality, we need a safe harbor to return to now and then, to catch up with old friends and family, to tend a garden and to be there for the harvest, to know the way and what to order at certain restaurants. Familiar has its place in our lives too.

      To weave oneself back into a community is a lovely thing indeed. My barber knows my face and exactly how to cut my hair the moment I walk in the door, even if he hasn’t learned my name in the twenty years I’ve been going there. Honestly, I don’t need him to know my name, only that I’ll be back again in a few weeks to do it all over again. The stories I tell him about where I’ve been since the last time he cut my hair carry him away from that barber shop even as I settle into the familiarity of it.

      As we begin this year, as we venture into an uncertain future, what are we inclined to chance upon? What will we wonder at? Sometimes it’s right in front of us, or within the pages of a book. But often it’s beyond our current experience, simply waiting for us to venture to it. To add venturing to our lives naturally lends itself to more adventure. To go and be and do and yes, to return again forever changed, in the time we have available to us.

      Tempus fugit: Time flies. Every moment of now is rapidly receding into then. How we use now isn’t always up to us, but sometimes—more often that we believe, it is ours alone to spend. Will this day, this year and the balance of our lives be full of familiar routines and comforting safe bets or will we dare to venture beyond?

    • To Be Productive and Daring

      Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake
      Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms.
      All flawless hexagons may melt and break;
      While you must feel the summer’s rage of fire,
      Beyond this frigid season’s empty storms.
      Banished to bloom, and bear the birds’ desire.
      — James Wright, To a Troubled Friend

      Winter is thriving. The darkest day of the year is almost upon us, and then Christmas, and New Year’s, and before we know it we’ll be looking ahead to spring. At least that’s the hope of winter days. We look ahead, placing ourselves in some future place, brighter and perhaps warmer than where we are now. But now is the gift we forever ignore at our peril.

      I want to make something of this day—to be productive and daring. To do the things I promise myself I’ll do in the earliest hours, before the sun rises, before the first coffee bolsters my courage, before this blog post is captured and released for your consideration. Before is now for the productive mind. Now is the time to write and create something, now is the time to do that workout that mocks us. Now is before we get to those things. After is like another season altogether for the busiest mind.

      It’s all a blur of restless productivity towards something beyond here and now. Simply do what must be done next, and beyond will be there waiting. How we like to believe it so! Do with today what we only dream about for tomorrow. For all flawless hexagons may melt and break.