The Hours of Our Lives

INew Year’s Eve is both a poignant and exciting time of year.  The days are short; the shadows are long.  We can no longer start our long afternoon walks after four or so---for we run into the darkness. Similarly, as we grow older, life choices seem limited by roads previously taken, yet, at the same time, we long to improve ourselves and break out of our negative patterns.  Today I want to reflect with you on time in several modes: calling into question the ways that we approach time and think about our lives.  I hope to help each of us make some enriching new decisions for 2007.

  A little over a year ago, I lost someone who had been a part of my life for 35 years, the best friend of both of my sisters, Louise Edwards.  Louise was 53 when she died very quickly.   Far from a couch potato, she was a competitive horsewoman who rode several times a week at my sister Mary’s farm in Acton MA.   She was successful at a number of careers---Ph.D. in biology, MBA, international currency trading for the Bank of Boston. Most recently, having decided to scale back her financial career in the light of significant wealth achieved, she worked in the biology department at Wellesley College. Louise had a complete physical in August of ’05. She passed with flying colors.  Her students left flowers on her desk at the college when she went for her initial hospital visit; they were still blooming when she died.

This death is the first of someone of “my” generation and it has impacted me deeply. I am grateful that I flew East to be with both my sisters, who lovingly organized and spoke at her memorial service.  What precious hours!  -- those spent in the time I had with my sisters and their families in the few days between her death, her memorial service, and my return.  Louise’s death has left me pondering the shortness of life, the quality of life, the things I cherish . . .

This year, 2006, at the same time of year give or take only a few days, another friend was struck down in his fifties—or, rather, the husband of a friend.  He left his family in disarray.  He had been fired from several jobs and when his wife (almost widow) went to sell their house to pay steep medical bills, she found the house, unbeknown to her, had already been sold. She literally was told she was homeless, she had nowhere to live.  Although this man had some good qualities, I see the shadow of his mismanagement of his affairs writ large across the lives of my acquaintances.

Life looks different after a sudden death, as different as our landscape after these huge deep snows!. . The same mountains and mesas, buildings, tall trees and evergreen bushes are there—the big landmarks, but the grass, the brambles, the little puddles and dips of the turf are gone.  Minor details of the landscape are obscured, obliterated. 

I  try to take from these stories my own lessons for a life well-lived.  Louise, and my sisters had a long-term, 35-year devoted friendship; although she was single and they were both married, they were extremely close.   Louise left a career that made her wealthy for another career that she found more humane and rewarding, and for a sport she loved.  My other acquaintance left his family in trouble.   Louise left a detailed will including bequests to all four of my sisters’ children who are all college-age.

Time is mysterious.  How do we conceptualize it?  Each of us has to struggle to deal with time. Each of the sciences has a different kind of knowledge about time. Psychotherapy, my current daily work, has a way of looking at time that is quite distinctive.

I came to psychotherapy in my forties and I immediately was exposed to a new kind of time:  one I explain to my clients with a simile which works best if you liked boiled onions, a favorite dish in my native New England.  Every person’s psyche is constructed like a boiled onion. If you push on it with your fork, a smaller onion shoots forth from inside until we get to wee little onions of childhood.  Nary a day goes by but each of us gets smacked with a fork and some of our inner onions shoot out.  A good therapist sees your inner onions immediately, even if you have your onionskin on.

No matter how powerful, taciturn or sophisticated you think you are, each of us is built around our inner child.  This kind of gut understanding of  “psychic time” is far more useful to me than scientific notions of time.  I have found this infinitely useful in dealing with clients, as well as myself, for almost everyone wants their inner child to be understood and appreciates help in comforting and soothing it. This is a different kind of relativity---one that says “You are forty or fifty, right?  Hmm. Would you like to examine the little onions inside you?”  The Scrooge story is an unexcelled reminder that inside the crusty old miser there lies a child who was left at boarding school over the holidays.

But what are we to do once we get in touch with all the “suffering” that forms our little onions?  Sharon Salzburg, a Buddhist, talks about working with her meditation teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche. Every time she would come to see him he would reflect on the experiences she brought that troubled her meditation:  “This is dukka,”  (the Buddhist term for suffering) said Trungpa.   Yet again she would come with a far different kind of unhappiness or disruption: “This too is dukka.”  Sharon grew tired of bringing her preoccupations to her teacher only to be told they were dukka. 

The view that all our trials are one same dukka after awhile leads us away from putting much stock in them.  Such a view, like that occasioned by a huge personal loss, marks a radical cutting away of all our problems.

Spending time in silence can be a spiritual discipline in many different traditions.  I grew up in a tradition that utilized silent prayer.  Today, Buddhist practice following the guidance of Pema Chodron has been very important to me in altering my view of time.  It’s a little hard to explain how time can be experienced differently, but think of our exercise with the various clocks that we just did with the children.  As simple as these different clocks are, they all connote methods of conceptualizing time that strait-jacket our minds into living our lives with a certain awareness rather than others.  Like the volume pedals on a piano, the differing clocks intensify certain experiences and not others! 

My experience is that meditation practice loosens the bonds of the linear view of time, the kind that we get from the calendar or date-book, and helps me to not only see but experience the “primacy of the present.”  The present is the only time when we can express compassion and savor the presence of for our fellow creatures. It is the only time when we can experience beauty.  Our creativity comes about in the present, and may transform our future.  Otherwise, I can be lulled into thinking that I have infinite time and that the “work day model” is the real model of time.

If you are interested in a simple introduction to Buddhist practice, or Pema Chodron, who is very accessible, a class is being offered this January here at JUC with our own Keith Arnold.

 Even the Dalai Lama admits that meditation is not for every purpose. Sometimes we have to use other brain modalities for problem solving. Awhile back, I was looking for a kind of volunteer work to do.  I stumbled into a place called the Summit Center, which is part of Jefferson Center for Mental Health. There was no pre-existing opportunity there that was looking for a volunteer.  I had to keep telling my story over and over---that I wanted to work with people and art.  The leaders of the group were very protective of the clientele and I had to prove that I had no agenda beyond showing up and helping others.  A year and a half later, this has become one of the most rewarding things I do.

In addition, watercolor has become a passion that gives me access to other areas of my brain. I always enjoy it, and it has evolved into a practice that enables me to see the world in new ways.  One way watercolor is much like life-- is that there is no good way to erase!  You are supposed to plan your picture before you begin, but the vagaries of how the paint runs and blends always create new challenges and opportunities.  I frequently have the experience of having to deal with one of those things called “blossoms.”

In silence, our perceptions of the challenges we face and relationships we are in often changes. I plan to host a three-hour silent retreat here at JUC in the Chapel on Jan 13 from 3 to 6, and I invite you to join us. There will be no instruction, just a silence with freedom to leave the room if needed. It will be followed by simple vegetarian food. If you have other things to do that day, you may want to find another way to practice silent time as your own life permits, rather than joining us at JUC.

The Presen:

My husband was most influenced by a physics professor at MIT called Doc Edgerton, who used to say “No time like the present.”

 I guess I love him because he is always saying “No time like the present!” A few of his recent discoveries are:

No time like the present to clean out your garage

No time like the present to see if your church pledge is paid up to date.

No time like the present to clean your closet and put your shoes on a little shoe rack.

No time like the present to click on “Portfolio Checkup.”

In addition to using this phrase for discovering loathsome tasks, however, he luckily has the same attitude toward pleasures and joys---No time like the present to take a long walk in the snow or a ski-day with the family.  No time like the present to connect with the people in your life. No time like the present to practice art, to write a card, to exercise.

This has been a great gift.

In planning this sermon, I asked you to think about the piechart of the hours of your life.  I hope you did---at least enough to get a glimpse of what your pie would look like.

Like Louise at her financial career, I actually did have a 60–hour a week job at one time when I was in academia. To be more precise, I had a hundred and fifty students a semester. it took 60 hours a week just to do the teaching and class prep and grading. It took far more than that to do the research and writing. The job—like many of our jobs-- was structured in such a way that there was no way to do it well in under seventy or eighty hours a week.

What suffers when we live those kinds of lives?  It depends, but it may be relationships; romance, often our best creativity.  Parenting, which is of critical importance but which is hard to quantify.

Women have to think about time in special ways if we want to combine a career and a having a family.  I used to teach women’s studies as well as religion and included in my courses Sylvia Hewlett, Creating a Life and When the Bough Breaks. A lot of my friends thought SH a traitor to the feminist cause because she talks about the biological clock. She even details, from personal experience, the stresses of attempting in vitro fertilization at 44 when one has been unable to conceive. She feels that women in highly successful jobs are seduced into spending their twenty most fertile years in the office, only to be duped by the sometimes dubious practices of in vitro clinics.  I thought that if we taught Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, we also had to articulate the strongest points made by the “other side.”  

I have hope that changes in the workplace are making work and jobs more person-friendly as well as family-friendly. Flex-time and the new “no desk time required” model are being much ballyhooed in our media these days.   I think there are not TWO models of work--- “flex time” versus “rigid time,”: there are all kinds of models of how to do work and utilize time.  I hope we all can explore more of these in 2007!

One of my favorite sayings is this “The future is asleep in the arms of the present.” The New Year’s Baby is asleep in all of us, in our hearts.   It is my way of saying that in the present, we hold the power to influence the future---but the power is quiet and dormant until we recognize its preciousness, its invitation.

Our lives could be long or short.  We probably will not be best remembered for those long nights at the office or frantic cleaning of our homes.

 I invite you to think today about changing your life this New Year’s Day. To change it in whatever way feels best to you, but make those changes your heart tells you you need to make.  Whether you make resolutions or not, let’s enter the new year with fresh eyes and high hopes.   Should you care to follow the example of my departed friend Louise, I invite you to maintain one or two friendships that last a lifetime; to have multiple careers in which you excel; to take good care of your horse, and to make a will that enables someone else to rise up and call you blessed!