Today’s accompanying tune: “Funny How Time Slips Away” by Tina Turner
Somehow, it is June.
Each year, I commit to doing less in an effort to make space for more. I will travel less in order to spend more time getting to know my new home. I will work less to make more time for leisure or rest. I will take trips in the car instead of flying to make more time for spontaneity and patience, for the small moments lost so easily at the alter of haste.
To date, I’d say that the year has been a largely successful attempt at this endeavor. I’ve made time to see family new and old, spent weekends celebrating birthdays in the city to the south, ran thousands of miles on trails by myself and with a growing group of similarly afflicted runners, and planted a garden. I’ve fought to protect the never-expanding resource that is time, and have delighted in the slow familiarity of learning a place in all its seasons, in all its coats. To watch the leaves emerge after weeks of dormancy before exploding with color as the petals unfurl. To recognize the birds as individuals as they visit the feeder just beyond the window. To learn the habits of the elk and deer who wander into the clearing; to watch their antlers disappear and grow again.
But still, somehow, it is June.
Time has again played one of its many tricks, convincing me that it, too, would embrace stillness. That it, too, would take a leisurely pace, that it would unfold not as it always has but how I needed it to. It lulled me into a savory experience while coating the world in a catalyst of sugar. It would continue moving forward, relentlessly, as the only way it knows how. It wouldn’t change its step, its cadence, its rhythms at the hushed, urgent pleas coming from inside the little blue house. Just one more day, I urged. Just one day with a little more time.
But time cannot hear me, cannot give any more of itself than it already has. It is finite, unmoving, ceaseless. It does not adjust for weeks with too many meetings, for days full of obligations scattered up and down the highway corridor. It does not feed on anticipation, nor does it try to rush the unpleasant. It cannot slow to drink in a moment, cannot pause to wait for the rest of us to catch our breaths. It cannot idle on the shoulder while we struggle to pull up alongside it. Even an empty calendar still turns to the month ahead.
The events marking the first half of this year were small, meager even. Hardly enough to jog the memory of how, exactly, I spent all that time. There was a trip here, a trip there. A big race that held my attention through the first quarter, and then the disappointment of that performance rounding out the following month. The courses that consumed my April weekends; the runs that ate up hours each Sunday. The weekday concert, directly opposing the concert I couldn’t manage to get to though I so desperately wanted to. The hours spent cursing the rain and cold, unfurling in the smoke rising from the chimney as I coaxed the fire alive and warm. The weeks our kitchen smelled like cooking oil as friends traipsed up into the forest from their apartments hours away to test the tenacity of our smoke alarm. The week in Joshua Tree that nearly broke me before it so delicately put me back together, as it always does. The morning watching my brother cast a line into the Atlantic Ocean as I tipped back in an Adirondack chair. The day in the passenger seat as Mary and I ambled through one of Washington’s most geographically unique towns. The warm afternoon Oliver slept in the sun on a blanket in the yard. The morning I hiked above the tree line and a little bit closer to my old self. The days where writing felt like wading chest-deep into the muck of a low tide, and the days where the wind and waves carried me forward without any effort of my own.
Okay, so maybe more than enough to jog a memory.
My committing to doing less was really about committing to scheduling less, to letting happenstance happen. That’s how I could make time for more without adding more time, without stretching the limits of what time is able to provide. Busy as a verb, instead of an adjective. Being thoughtful, mindful, of how the time that I have accrued will be spent, because it will be spent regardless of the way in which I dispense it. It will continue to move; June will continue to come. I will continue to plea for its easing, for its pause. I will lament all that I was not able to do, the trips not taken and the friends not seen. The climbing trips abandoned and the routes never hiked. The hours away from the dogs and Andrew when all I want is to be huddled in the comfort of their presence, always. The words unwritten and unread.
Time will always uphold its promise to move. To continue forward. It is a promise without pause, without fail. The least I can do is to promise to use its gifts wisely, with intention and purpose of my own. To let go of that which is rooted in obligation or anxiety, that which only causes pain. That which, at the end of the day, feels wasteful. Because time will always uphold its promise. It will allow me to waste my allotment should I choose. It is an incredibly easy trap to fall into, one in which I’ve freed myself from in the past. One in which busy is the adjective, is the goal. But a life without waste, a life of time, is one where busy is the verb, full of intent and wonder.
In that life, it is still somehow June. But instead of pleading for time to slow so that I may catch up, I merely glance at the new page of an empty calendar, wondrous as its small array of boxes offer promises kept. Promises of tiny moments to fill a year, a life. Ones not planned, nor scheduled. Ones that will propel me into July, then August. Ones that will make me wonder where, exactly the time has gone. Ones that will remind me exactly where it went, enough to jog a memory should I choose.
Here’s to June.
- Megan