Time is a river, time is a gift, time flies…
Junior year, I took a class called Popular Fiction and Media. I chose the class in a desperate attempt to entertain myself between my excruciating business classes filled with even more excruciating people.
The professor had short hair, wore a skirt that touched the floor, and bounced around with far too much energy for 9 am.
The sounds of laptops opening, water bottles clanking, and feet shuffling quieted as she began speaking. I don’t know exactly what her opening line was, but I know within the first few minutes, she was talking about time being a social construct.
I could feel my eyes roll to the back of my head.
I had this habit of taking classes with undisclosed themes. It landed me in a Martial Arts Cinema class the year before.
Of course, I cast judgement too soon.
Now, did this professor end up being a life-altering figure of wisdom in my life? No. Was it the best class I have ever taken? No.
BUT
While I multi-tasked: did my finance homework, online shopped, and color-coded my planner, the eccentric professor slipped a few ideas in my head that stuck.
The theme of the class was the concept of time in media. This may sound interesting to you, or you may wonder as I did, “How long can we talk about the concept of time before turning into an SNL skit about liberal arts schools?”
Time was the only thing that was real, that was unstoppable. Could we just leave time alone for now?
Fascinatingly, it doesn’t feel like we talk much about the concept of time, but we talk about it constantly. Of course, we say things like, “What time is it?”, “How much longer ‘til lunch?”, “This movie is how long?”
But, woven between these mundane comments are more revealing phrases that reveal our strange relationship with the broader concept of time itself.
We say…
“Do you have a minute?” – What does it mean to have a minute? Is time something we can own?
“Could I steal a moment of your time?” – If time is something we own, can we give it out? How much do we think about who we lend this precious resource to?
“One day, I’ll have time to pick up my old hobbies” – What day? When or where is this future wherein our best selves, who have time to explore our hobbies, go to the gym, and finally get the sleep we’ve been missing out on, get to live? Will we ever arrive at this glimmering palace in the distance?
We come up with fascinating analogies about time, too.
We say…
Time is a gift.
There’s a bittersweet moment, that happens to all of us quietly, where we lose the careless demeanor of childhood, and realize that each moment with a grandparent, parent, friend, is finite, that each moment with these people, with your hometown, with the delightfully unsteady state of college, is fleeting.
This March, sitting in my grandparents’ basement, having seen my grandma for the first time in a year, with her health much worse than the last time I had seen her, I heard myself say between sobs,
“I just feel like my childhood is over.”
I knew it was silly when I said it. I also knew it wasn’t true. In most ways, my childhood had ended many years ago, and I hadn’t even cared to notice.
In this moment, losing my childhood meant losing the lack of care and value for time that I once had in that house. It meant following my grandpa through his garden as he handed me tomatoes, playing with my cousins in the basement, staying up too late to watch the Soup with the older ones, and begrudgingly watching BBC with my mom and grandma. It meant sometimes feeling bored and wanting to go home.
It’s a gift to be bored, unbothered by the pressures of time.
While it’s hard to lose this naivety, there’s something romantic about waking up to the importance of each moment. Although I thought time was constant and unwavering, something to be protected from the scheming of my maxi-skirt-wearing professor, time is much less rigid than I thought.
An hour of class can feel like a lifetime.
Ten hours can disappear with old friends…
Time flies.
This metaphor suggests that time is not bound to the ground like us. It’s in constant motion, beyond the grasp of us mere mortals.
Interestingly, many of our phrases about time revolve around the concept of control. Phrases like “losing track” imply that we once had control over it. And we try to gain control. We come up with phrases and metaphors, we color-code calendars, we even say funny things like, “I lost track of time,” as if time were an unruly dog that slipped through its leash.
Maybe time is a bird or a dog, but I can’t help but think…
Time is a river.
There’s something about this one that makes your stomach turn.
A river flows forward, whether you like it or not. It can wash over you. It’s unmerciful.
Thomas Cole’s series, The Voyage of Life, portrays this river through a series of four vignettes: Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age.
In Childhood, the protagonist emerges from darkness. He begins his journey through a vast, lush landscape. The end of the river is out of sight, and so is the angel who stands close behind him.
In Youth, a glimmering palace lies in the distance. The land remains lush. The angel has stepped off the boat, but remains close, keeping watch. It’s idyllic, optimistic, hopeful, and naive.
This one’s my favorite.
Standing with my college roommates, a little less than one year out from graduating, we sigh at Manhood.
In this vignette, the rapids grow, the palace is out of sight, and the protagonist and viewer alike know that he is destined for dangerous terrain. In reality, our rapids have only just started to grow. We don’t really have much to sigh about, but we know this scene grows nearer every day.
Although harrowing, there’s something thrilling about this one.
In the final installment of the series, Old Age, the protagonist finds himself in calm waters. The foliage is gone, and the angel, in his view for the first time, guides him up to a glowing cloud with barely distinguishable angels, drawn with small swipes of white paint. Is this the palace? It’s humbler than it seemed in Youth, but the bright light brings a silent sense of peace.
I can’t decide if this class, the time spent thinking about its concepts, and don’t even get me started about the book Four Thousand Weeks, have given me a healthier or unhealthier relationship with time. I’m a time maximizer, soothed by busy-ness, finding sick excitement in the rapids of Cole’s Manhood.
While I find solace in the thought that I make the most of my time, I know there is no such thing as the most. To chase perfection is to do so in vain.
In Four Thousand Weeks, (I warned you!) Oliver Berkman describes this tendency to seek control over our limited (on average, four thousand weeks) time on Earth and chase a perfect future that never comes.
“I have time.”
“One day, I’ll have time to pick up my old hobbies.”
But time is an unruly dog.
Time is funny.
Time is relentless.
Hey, maybe it’s even a social construct.
When you don’t think about it or talk about it, it passes without your permission. When you fixate on it, it still fails to slow or stop.
Time is a river, time is a gift, time flies…
But most importantly, it’s out of our control. Maybe it’s in that sentiment, rather than convoluted metaphors, self-help books, and color-coded planners, that we can enjoy a silent sense of peace.