Working Time

Struggling with time is struggling with meaning, one and the same thing, in my mind. What is to be done with time as it courses and meanders through our lives? The days go by as we think we use them. I don’t believe there is a human being on this planet who has a real handle on how to use time effectively which connotes industrialism; rather, one  who dispenses time as one might put on cologne, atomizing it, spritzing over your head and going beneath it to be sweetly inundated in essences. No methods exist for manipulating time. That is a fool’s fantasy. I speak of time that makes this moment and the next part and parcel of the time ahead. All this comes to mind as I am planning a trip to see my son, Jordan, in Chicago in about four weeks. I choose to see him for my mental health. I need to get away from the geriatric ghetto I moved into here in Green Valley, Arizona. I choose to visit with him because how many visits do I have left to see him as he lives so far away.  I am not being maudlin, I am being very pragmatic and realistic. It is getting close to the time in which I need my luggage packed.I  have questions to ask him as a father, I have queries to pose to him, and I need to hear him on different levels as a man and son. I want to be ready (ha!) when the bell tolls. All lives are incomplete. However, i know, I hope, my children will read my books after I am gone, for they say almost everything about me I can imagine to say. They are my autobiographical history, here fictionalized, here non-fictionalized, all for the telling and sharing. So, in a way I have “captured” time. Not really, but I feel delusions serve good ends at times.

I muse now. We cannot plan time — we think we can. We clock it, we digitalize it; we divide it. We organize for it. We make holidays from it. We create years on calendars ahead. We look backwards upon time and call it tradition or history. We look forward and call it future. What we have not mastered is how to dispense or disperse it moment to moment so that we savor its strength and sweetness, for in time things develop and grow, children become adults, passion cools, reason becomes wisdom and the world changes while often we stagnate. I am curious about time at 68. I have no need to extend it. It is not hambuger helper. I want to enter it, seek out its struts, how it rests on its fundament, what makes it “tick.” In every tick is present slipping into past. The poet said, “Gather ye rosebuds, young virgins, while ye may,” or words to that effect. I believe that is true at any age and I am trying again to play with, to understand, to realize, to figure out the measure of time given to me. I know while I write time stands still. I know while I write that I am doing something vitally important for me in the second. As my fingers trounce upon the keyboard, I feel a suspended animation, as if the ultimate referee calls time out. Other than writing I would like to acquire a similar feeling in my living of the day. The trip to Chicago is an act in time, to shape and sculpt it for the experience that lies ahead with my son, my family. What must it be like to live on a daily basis having that same intention?  As i said earlier I am struggling with that. I write about it here, I think about it, and I muse about it. The desire is to squeeze the lemon until its pips squeak. I do know that one can become frantic and not a little hysteric and overwrought when the realization huits that one is not immortal and one has not done well with time. Ironically the con says in despair that he’s doing time. It might be wise to ask a convict, in fantasy, how he sees time. For those outdoors and free, I will argue that we are in a different prison as well. We think we are free and using time. We are not. We are merchandising time, using it to produce things. Ask a real artist and I imagine for him time is virtual, that is, it is lived within a flow within the minute and within the hour. An artist has no sense of time as he creates.

For the artist, for the creative soul time stands still; he enters this house and dwells for a while. However for the mass of mankind, most of us do not ask the questions we should as we are conditioned to seek answers. I am asking all kinds of questions as I bathe in time, washed by a liquid and a solvent I do not truly grasp. One question that I pose is this: how can I use time creatively, productively, intensely so that I feel at the end of a minute, hour or week that I have accomplished an end or did something or performed significantly? I believe these are pragmatic concerns and because they are pragmatic they leave out something beautiful and magical if not soul-stirring. How can I be with time so that I ride its crest, so that I am both time and not of it, that I feel purposeful, meaningful? I imagine what I really feel is a need to attain  union with my existence so that I feel at one. In that attainment death is not to be feared. It is only an agent, one among many, of time itself.