Time. Of all the times and places to be jogged into thinking about time watching television one night last year wasn’t one I would have anticipated. There are some programs my wife and I particularly like to watch together – the blessings of having a digital recorder and being able to choose what it is we want to see at a time when we’re free to do it. The program we’d chosen to watch that night was “Desperate Housewives,” a special program at the beginning of the season in which Eddy, a rather flamboyant character who was going to be dropped by the show, was portrayed as having died in her mid-thirties and is being remembered by the other characters for the blessings she’d bestowed on them – blessings the viewers hadn’t been given a chance to see.
In one of the vignettes Eddy suggests to her neighbor, Gabby, that they go to a bar to party to cheer Gabby up after gets divorced. They decide to have a competition for who could get the most swizzle sticks from drinks bought for them by different men. Gabby wins, in spite of Eddy’s voluminous chest and a mini skirt that barely – and I mean barely – covers her rear end. Afterwards, Gabby finds Eddy sitting on a swing, crying. She’s sad to have lost. It’s made her feel like her youth was gone, and with it, any hope for the future. She’ll never make it to fifty, says Eddy, with tears in her eyes. It’s as though her life was about to be over just because someone thought she wasn’t as pretty as her neighbor. The glow of her youthful beauty was gone.
Though I never had such a glow to lose, I understand how Eddy felt. I thought everything was going to go downhill for me when I was thirty-five, even though I still had more than half my life to live – and have lived it well, in fact, have lived it better than the first thirty-five – and I’m still going strong. I know my time on this earth isn’t going to last forever. One of my brothers died before he was fifty and the other didn’t make it to sixty. As one of my favorite poets puts it, that causes me some distress. I don’t like to think about not being anymore. I’ve gotten used to “seeing, touchy, tasting” the “unimaginable you” of life, as another poet puts it.
But one day my life will come to an end and there is nothing I can to change this, although I do have some control over how I’m going to experience the time I have left. Thinking about this brought to mind one of my favorite children’s stories, the story of Ferdinand the Bull, with Robert Lawson’s wonderful pictures of Ferdinand smelling the flowers with a big bovine smile on his face. I remember lying on the floor of the solarium in my parent’s house on a cold winter day like this reading about Ferdinand and looking up at light beams coming through the windows with dust swirling in them. I experienced time in childhood moments like this with a delicious slowness. A child should experience time this way. A day in the life of a five-year old is a lot bigger portion of the life she or he has lived than the day in the life of someone who’s almost seventy-two, as I now am. Time to me these days doesn’t go by with a delicious slowness. It flies by. The things I enjoy doing are over, it seems, almost before they’ve begun.
But the answer to this isn’t to go out to a bar to try to get a lot of swizzle sticks, even if my wife would let me get away with it. And it isn’t to try to slow things down to a pace where I can spend the afternoon looking at sunbeams without having to think of what comes next. The answer to the speed with which my life now seems to be flying by is to stay involved with it and “to be of use,” as Marge Piercy has put it – to make use of the time I have left.
While I was teaching at our UU seminary in Berkeley I remember having a conversation with a student who was concerned about having to spend time waiting for the beginning of her internship. I shared with her something I found on the Internet. It was about how to avoid feeling we’re wasting time. “How do you make your life seem longer?” asked whoever it was out there in Internet Land: “Open yourself up to a broader experience,” said the person he was asking. “Don’t just do what you’ve done before. Try something that’s new, something you haven’t done before.” Every once in awhile I’ve taken this kind of advice and the interesting thing is that when I have I’ve forgotten all about the time that was passing because it was what was going on that mattered, not what was going to come. Writing a sermon is like this for me. I get lost in the experience of dreaming up the ideas I want to talk about, weaving them together and then finding out the thoughts my ideas have stimulated in others. For me, getting caught up in conceiving, giving shape to and sharing ideas is an almost a timeless experience – and it’s something that for me – and I hope for you – something that has a great deal of meaning.
The person on Internet evidently felt the same way about doing things that gave his life meaning. He said that when he lost himself in what he was doing it was like entering into an intensity that seemed to last forever, even though, in chronological time, it didn’t. He said: “These are the moments that people say ‘seem like a lifetime,’ because well, they pretty much are!”
But our experience of time isn’t just about how we experience it. It’s also about how we think about it as it’s passing. A pair of Stanford researchers, Phillip Zimbardo and John Boyd, found that the people in their studies who felt best about themselves were those who didn’t regret the time in their lives that had passed. Even though they may have believed that some of that time had been spent badly, they didn’t want it back. They were willing to let go of it, realizing there is nothing to be gained by trying to get back something we can’t have, whether it’s a youthful glow or a chance to have done something better.
There’s also a question about how we should feel about the time we have left. There’s a story about this in an article written by Derek Beres. It’s about Katharine Moser, a young woman who, her early twenties, decided to be tested to find out whether or not she would be stricken with Huntington’s Disease, as had her grandfather. Since Huntington’s is a genetic disease, Katharine wanted to find out if the same would be afflicted with it. For people who have Huntington’s it’s typical that by the age of fifty they will begin having trouble remembering things and will begin losing they ability to control their movements. The question for those who have parents or grandparents who have had the disease is whether it’s better or not to find out whether they’re going to have it, too. Knowledge of an impending disease can frightening, so a lot of people would rather not know whether or not they are going to be affected by it. Katharine decided she wanted to know as much as she could about what the future might bring so she could spend whatever time she had left as well as she could.
In thinking about Katharine, Beres, who is a person who likes to engage in a lot of physical activity, says it irks him when he hears someone who claims he’d like to be physically active, too, say: “I’d like to work out more often, but I don’t have the time." He says his answer is: “If you don’t have the time, who does? Who is so in control of your time that you no longer have any say about it?” None of us are in full control of our time, but we’re in more control of it than we usually think. That’s at least what Katharine Moser believes. Sure, she knew that Huntington’s might cut short her life, or at least make the end of it more difficult. But she decided that didn’t mean she had to waste the time she had left – waste I by worrying about what was going to happen next. As Beres puts it: “Nobody can make use of our time better than we can, so it’s best to use it to the best of our abilities.”
Doing this isn’t always easy. When Katharine got the results of her tests she “thought she was as ready as anyone could be to face her genetic destiny. Yet, as she went into the doctor’s office to hear the results, she realized she wasn’t ready to hear what he said. “What do I do now?” she asked. “What do you want to do?” he replied. “Cry,” she said.
And she did. In fact, in the coming weeks Katharine couldn’t seem to stop crying. In the months that followed Katherine wasn’t able to develop the kind of heroic way of dealing such knowledge some people seem able to do. Her response was more human. She did what she could to fight her melancholy, looking for whatever humor she could find in her situation, and she tried to care of herself as best she could. For instance, when her social worker told her: “Don’t let yourself get too thin,” Katharine replied: “Not a problem,” pointing to her rather amply figure. “No more than two drinks at a time,” said the social worker. “Not a problem, either,” said Katharine, “as long as you mean one in each hand.” But Katherine’s sense of humor didn’t keep her from getting angry. “Why me?” she remembers thinking, in a refrain she found hard to shake in the coming months. “It’s not like I’m sick because I smoked or I did something dangerous.” But, ironically, letting her anger out seemed to help. It was much better than trying to stifle it.
In the months that followed, Katharine found it saddening to think back on what she was like before she found out the disease. She felt she had to repress the crush she had on a certain firefighter; certain she’d no longer be able to get married. Then she threw herself into trying to raise money for a foundation committed to finding a cure for Huntington’s. Sometimes, she just raged, shouting out to an empty room about how angry she was.
But, finally, acceptance began to take hold and Katherine began to think about the time she had left in a way that was more open. As she thought about the future, she decided she wasn’t going to let all of it be determined by Huntington’s. For instance, other than the risk of having children who might bear the disease – which is something she could avoid, if she chose – why not act on the crush she had on the fireman? Why not get married, if she found the right person. Katharine decided that almost anything she might want to do was at least worth trying. What was important was not so much her limitations; it was living as though what mattered was what she did with her life.
The same is true for us, no matter who we are and no matter where we are in our lives. After all, who really knows what lies ahead? Something marvelous might happen that we didn’t expect, or, as a teacher of mine once put it: “Instead of dying in some Shakespearean way, my luck would have it that I’ll step off a curb and be hit by an ice cream truck!” Months ago I could never have imagined being the Consulting Senior minister of a marvelous church like this – in fact, of ever being active in the parish ministry again. I was just going to be retired, whatever that meant. But, I like “to be of use,” as Marge Piercy puts it, so being of use I am.
Time is more precious to me now than it ever was, because for me, now, there’s less left. So. If I’m going to live what time is left in a way that’s of use, I’ve got to be willing to experience it with the kind of openness and depth Katharine Moser decided she would. I’m not always up to the challenge, but I’ve got friends, like my wife, who will hit me over the head with a two-by-four of love when I’m in a funk and tell me to get back to living the life I’ve got left.
As Marge Piercy put it in the remarkable poem that’s in our hymnbook, no matter how much time we have yet to live, we should:
Live a life that [we] can endure:
make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and untangling and taking more in….
Live as though [we] like [ourselves] and what may happen:
Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time:
[Even if] not for always.
For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
After the long season of tending and growth,
The harvest comes.
May the harvest of our lives be bountiful and our experiencing of life be as wondrous as this thing called time. May we, like Ferdinand, chose to spend our time fully and well – and, as Marge Piercy puts it, was we spend our time, may we spend it in a way that’s of use.
“For the Child the Time is Now”
Adapted from a Paper Written by Rod Burton
Try to explain to a five-year-old a "tomorrow," or a "yesterday," or even wait until "later." For a child time is "now." Time is not repeating itself for the child who skips joyfully up and down the stairs. It is a pleasure that perseveres. For a grownup a stairway is just a contrivance connecting downstairs to upstairs. The adult ascends because there is something to do elsewhere – to even to consider the prospect of running up and down a flight of stairs would be childish. But a child sent upstairs to fetch something may dally on the steps for a quarter of an hour, taken up with the wonder of an imaginary mountain climb, or the a bumpity-bumpity slide down. The original intention for ascending the stairs to get something becomes just another "present" that must wait to take place in its own time.
There is a fundamental difference between my experience of time and that of my five-year-old daughter. The morning ritual of getting her to daycare consists of exhorting her to rush, to hurry, to get dressed (right now), to get breakfast done, to get into the van, and to get into the daycare center. In other words, I force her to act in a way that’s oriented toward the future so I won't be late for work. I’m not attuned to her ability to live in the present – a present that does not know about a future or a past. What does daughter know, as a young and fresh human, being but to dawdle in the snow, greet the alley cat, pick up a twig, contemplate the possibilities of a discarded gum wrapper, or make a wish upon a morning star.
To the young child, time does not flow. A child stands, as it were, outside of it, remaining in the now seemingly forever. All-to-soon, though, she’ll be socialized to live an abbreviated life, to organize what must be done now for tomorrow.
Reading Taken from Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
By Paul Theroux
In his book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star Paul Theroux writes about taking a trip by train across Europe and Asia retracing a route he had taken thirty years before. Of his experience he writes:
Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate [the fact that] nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts….
A great satisfaction in growing old – one of many – is assuming the role of witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy – the world as a wheel of repetition. They – I should say “we” – are bored by things we’ve heard a million times before, books we’ve dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the proposed solutions that will solve nothing. “I can tell that I am growing old,” says the narrator in Borges’s story “The Congress.” “One unmistakable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it – it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.”…
Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes. But they are not. They are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame….
CHALICE LIGHTING
Jan Sammons
It was a perfect time, in a life full of uncertainties, and I knew, when it was happening, that I wanted to freeze it in time, to remember it always, and so I took a mental snapshot of it. Now, all these years later, I can still call up that snapshot and walk right back into it.
It was late September 1971. The Vietnam War was raging; as the Pentagon Papers revealed that the government had consistently and deliberately mislead the American public. In April of that year, 2000 Vietnam Vets Against the War rallied in Washington. Many threw their combat medals on the steps of the capital. It was a tumultuous time.
And my personal life was in turmoil too. My marriage of one year was falling apart. I needed a job.
I had just completed my first year of teaching English in a junior high school in Cincinnati. It had been a tough year, in a tough school; so tough that, when I was hired, the principal suggested that I find a way to get to school other than driving my car. He said they’d had a rash of students pouring sugar into the gas tanks of teacher’s cars. This was before the days of locking gas caps.
Once inside the school, it didn’t get any better. Teachers were required to lock their doors during class, and we were not allowed to excuse students to use the restroom. Students had been mugged in the hallways and the administration was trying to keep them safe. They had hired very large young men to patrol the halls with walkie-talkies, to keep out dangerous people in the neighborhood, and to make sure our students weren’t accosting each other.
I had chosen to teach English because I thought the communication skills I could teach would help students succeed, and that literate people would make a better society. But my college classes and my student teaching left me utterly unequipped for the war zone in which I found myself. So, at the end of the school year, I quit.
In that chaotic time, Erin appeared, in my life. She was a three-month-old charmer. She had chocolate brown eyes, a quick laugh, loved being around people, and especially liked outings. Her mom, Jackie, was raising her alone and was in desperate need of day care. The job didn’t pay much, but it was enough to buy groceries. And, it allowed me some time to sort out what I wanted to do with my life.
On that September day, when I took my mental snapshot, I had Erin strapped to me in a snuggly baby carrier. It was a cool, crisp, day, and my floor length green wool cape covered us both. I could look down at her as she slept against my chest. I was on my way to the local Unitarian Universalist church for a meeting with its minister, David Sammons, the man who, several years later would become my husband. It was about a thirty-minute walk in that golden autumn light. I had missed that light for most of my life, being either a student or a teacher and in school during most of the daylight hours. That day I soaked it in. I walked past the University of Cincinnati, where I had earned my teaching credential, and then past Burnet Woods, with its trees still green, no leaves had yet fallen. I breathed in the air, grateful for the time to walk and think, and I took my mental snapshot. I wanted to remember what being happy is like, so that on the days when happiness was elusive, I could remember the simple pleasure of walking with a baby on that autumn day.
I didn’t use the term “mindfulness” then, but now I know that’s what was happening. While the storms of society and my personal life swirled around me, I was able to take thirty minutes to walk, mindfully, enjoying the peace and joy surrounding me.
I light this candle today for mindful attention, and for allowing time for it into our lives.