Time Flows

“It's just a long flowing river of time. As I've gotten older it's started to flow faster, like the Niagara River when you get close to the falls. It's hard to stick a knife in there and carve out a slice.”

A friend of mine wrote the words above. And it’s the time of year to think about time and what to do with the twenty-four hours I am given each day. I like this idea. That the river flows despite what I do. Takes some of the pressure off and helps me relax a bit as others are bustling with their resolutions. The natural order of things is to continue, to keep going when the going gets tough. The river washes the silt to the bottom and leaves the top for canoeing and fish-catching and sticks tossed down-river by little boys. I love the idea of where the water has been and what the current has picked up. What is worthy enough of keeping and what is thrown back up on the bank. It’s a good question for me too. Time cleanses me. A lot of my mistakes and mis-steps are drowned in the river. Good thing. There are lots of things for me to throw back up on the bank, too.

I know the sense of urgency as time speeds up. As a teacher, there is a rigid yearly schedule that I must keep. But it seems that each year the time between the first day of school and the last day of school condenses magically, like the way an entire meal of space food can fit into a tiny pouch. Not sure how to reconstitute the minutes of my life as easily as the astronauts can bring their space pot roast back to wholeness, though. My daughter is seven. Seems to me she was just born a few months ago and I am still fighting lack of sleep and lack of baby knowledge. My dad has been gone over eight years. But when I walk in my mother’s house and turn the corner through the kitchen, I still expect to see him sitting in his blue lazy-boy recliner. And then there is me. I can’t ever seem to get a handle on the fact that I am the grown-up now, the one paying the bills and stoking the fire and planning the trips. I swear I was just in the back of the Malibu station wagon throwing up on the way to…well, anywhere! And now I am taking my mini-van in for new windshield wipers and power steering. Where has all that time gone? And has the river worked it’s magic? Has the current forced the silt to the bottom and left the goodness floating on the waves, like the way the best of the cream rises to the top? Good question for a new year. What parts of me need to be re-captured and re-worked, and what needs to be thrown up on the banks to rot with the driftwood?

But sometimes it seems like my river is more of a lazy river. Yes, for the obvious reasons. But also because the water flows in a circle and the hapless folks on the inner-tubes end up right back where they started. It’s like that with me and my déjà vu when I battle the same questions about my weight and my energy and the ways I spend my time. Didn’t I already fight this battle? Why did I lose twenty pounds and then gain it all back? Didn’t I just decide to wake up early and start each day out serenely? Then why do I hit snooze eight times and catapult stupidly into my day? I really don’t mind the river, the passage of time so much, as the circular repeating. The same old mistakes over and over. With the same old results.

My friend says it’s hard to carve out a slice of time. I guess that is true of a river. You can’t really stop the flow and you can’t avoid the falls and the rapids. And I do find it difficult to focus on moments and minutiae and the present. So many old wounds and future fears get in the way. But I think that is my wish for this new year, and new decade of my life. I want to live in the present. To breathe. To feel each jostle of the water and each steadying of the canoe. To throw the sticks in the river with my son and stick around to watch them float downstream to where our eyes can no longer even make them out. It is difficult but not impossible to pay attention to the joys and the searing disappointments and the moments of hilarity as they occur. It is difficult to live in each moment and graciously receive it for better or for worse. I am not as strong as a river, nor as unyielding, it turns out. But I will choose each day to breathe in all of the moments and write them on my heart.