I think it’s a mistake to believe in the fungibility of time.
I mean, it’s the same arbitrary collection of units: always 60 seconds in a minute, always 60 minutes in an hour. A day will beat out its rhythm in the same number of seconds, immutable. An hour, whether time flies by or not, will still be, empirically, an hour.
Except none of that is true. Because we don’t actually measure our lives in fixed units — we measure it in breaths, in experiences, in sleep, in wonder.
And those things change — they change by the weight we give them, and they change by the length of our experience of them.
I’ve said this before: every year, things move faster. I fear the length of winter less each year, because every year, my own time moves more quickly. It starts to snow, winter’s here, and then, almost immediately, crocuses appear. Summer moves just as quickly, maybe even more quickly, and I cannot find the brakes, as much as I want to.
I fear that ever-increasing speeding wheel of time; I fear that it will speed so much that all of the things I want to do will not get done. I snatch at time and it easily evades my grasp.
I think part of it is that a year is now so much smaller a fraction of my life than it was at 17 or 20 or even 30. Weighed against the rest of my life, a year shrinks every time it passes. Yet I can still remember the way summers used to move so delightfully slowly when I was a teen — and how frustrating it was to wait for even a week for something I wanted to happen to finally arrive.
I don’t think I am imagining anything to say that they were, just then, the definition of yearning.
I raise this after a walk on high ground above a pond-side walking trail. (“Above” is important, because, just the way many people choose not to look inside, many people fail to look up.)
From where I was walking, the pond was a silver and shining oval, the trail an arc of grey fine gravel, and on it, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, walking together. Two teenagers at that still awkward, coltish time, when it’s like they hadn’t figured out how their suddenly long arms and legs were supposed to move properly. And something else.
You know how sometimes you see people together, and they, without even really coming close to touching, manage to signal that they are closer than they appear?
They have a shared way of looking at each other, the angle in the way they lean towards each other like plants leaning towards a south-facing window.
They had it, all of it. Walking slowly, as if trying to make the most of limited and precious time together.
They were not physically distancing — not completely — but I found it hard to blame them for that.
I don’t think I am imagining anything to say that they were, just then, the definition of yearning.
I looked away towards the road, lengthened my stride.
All of this is a way of saying, amongst everything else that’s going on in these most pandemical of times, try to have some sympathy for those for whom this handful of short weeks must already feel like a lifetime.
There are plenty of worries for the rest of us — jobs, money, fear, the uncertainty of the future, all of it piled up in that soup-stock that cooks and serves bad dreams.
But fair to say that, for the young among us, this already feels like it’s lasted for years, and like it just might stretch out into eternity.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
