Oh, Time, You Easily Squandered Thing - -I Choose You Over Drivel

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Time is a funny thing, a wispy current. Or maybe it’s not funny at all, and lands like a rude thud with no regard for our wishes.

Either way, some days, I swear to you, time doesn’t exist.

For me, time flies at the speed of light. (Physics majors out there, please correct my understanding of relativity.) Since I can’t see time in the moment, maybe a better vantage point would be to look at it after it happens, by years or a century. At least I’d be able to see a record of it. I’d know I had a life.

I know some people are into future seers, diviners who sit in front of you with their eyes on your future self, checking you out like a spy with binoculars. But I’d rather be in the future, looking around, touching the things, smelling the smells. What would it be like to see my home a hundred years from now? Would I be looking down at the ground on which it sat? Or at a new public park? Or, since I live in northern Virginia, a colossal data center?

There are motivational concepts that have you look at your life from a year or six months out — imagining, speculating, reverse planning. These are helpful. But what if I looked at my life not from just down the road or its endpoint, but from well beyond that?

Yeah. I know. Could be depressing. But hear me out.

I appeared on the planet roughly eighty years after the birth of my great-grandmother. In my kitchen cabinet sits a mixing bowl that was hers. It’s all I have of her, and since I’m the oldest of my generation in my mom’s immediate line, I have the great distinction of holding a handful of memories of my great-grandmother, too. Some in my generation never met her.

I can still see her sitting in a chair — wherever she was, always seated — with her halting words and heavily wrinkled face, bright white hair, an enigma to my child’s mind. My memories of her have me off to the side, staring, observing — but only briefly. I had too many child things to tend to.

Short-lived though the interactions were, I don’t ever seem to erase those memories of her.

Today, her mixing bowl is not in use in my kitchen. It’s safeguarded because it’s a relic and an heirloom. It’s prized. It would feel like the end of a generation, should it ever break into pieces. I have no memory of it being used, but I know it must have seen some serious cooking in its day. Is it now in its seated era? Off to the side, an enigma?

If I have great-grandchildren, I’m not sure I’ll be around to meet them. New generations used to come around in less time than they do today. I took my time having kids. My kids met their great-grandparents, but they have little memory of them.

I have another mixing bowl, one from my grandmother, which is perhaps my most prized possession of the things I have from my deceased. I remember it well — hands folding dough inside it and the electric mixer banging against its sides, on holidays and during the summer. It used to hold ingredients. Now it holds my familial past.

My kids have no connection to that bowl. They were born a handful of years before my grandmother died. She had long retired from prolific cooking. But I tell my kids stories of that bowl — not many, but some. They know it’s important to me, and that’s the extent of it.

If I’m lucky, I’ll exist in body or memory for up to three generations: mine, my kids’, my grandkids’. Maybe my grandkids will still have flickers of memories of me in their 80s, which will be in 2125. The memory of me and the relics I embody will exist for at most another hundred years.

My life is a star that was born fiery and bright, but over time, it’s dimmed. One day it’ll go out. My favorite mixing bowl will one day be unrecognizable to my bloodline. Someone will pick it up from a pile of things being packed for Goodwill, and say, “Anyone know where this bowl came from?” Everybody in the room will shrug.

This thing we experience for roughly 70–80 years — if we’re lucky — peaks in importance in a short amount of time. After that, it dims into darkness. My life is, by and large, for me.

If this is true, am I choosing the contents of it wisely? Choosing requires awareness in the moment. But what will compel me to notice? And once I notice, what will entice me to choose well?

Flash forward to my deathbed. Again, hear me out.

There I am, lying on my back with my loved ones surrounding me as I say to them in a shaky, feeble voice, “Please go to my closet and bring me the twenty cotton t-shirts that I bought at Target and Walmart over the years.”

My loved ones look perplexed, but indulge my dying wishes. They return with a stack of t-shirts in various colors. I beg them to bring them close to my face. They do.

“Mmmm. Just smell that — cotton. Look at the colors — burgundy, olive, teal, pink. I wore a few of these and never touched the rest. Can you believe how amazing these are? Cotton t-shirts? They changed the course of my life. I hope you can see how important cotton t-shirts are to the life experience.”

My loved ones just stare, not knowing what to say. Is it the pain meds? But I continue.

“Please, I must reminisce about all those random links I clicked on over the last decades, the ones that led me to endless webpages of mostly drivel and blather. Every single one showed me what it means to be alive. This life is fleeting and precious. I know that now. Especially after having read many, many times about the latest celebrity who did something fantastical, though it never was, to be honest. Yet, still — what a wild ride, those links to those captivating webpages.”

My loved ones look concerned as they search for answers in each other's faces. Maybe this is what it’s like to have your star finally black out??

I cough briefly and continue.

“And we can’t forget all the politics, the gossip, the kvetching, the — "

This is when my son steps in. He takes a rock out of his pocket.

“Mom, do you remember that time when we all went to the beach and searched for fossils in the sand?” He holds up the piece of petrified whale bone. “I’ll never forget that trip. It was the coolest.” Tears are trickling down his face.

This is when it hits me. My son will keep that whale bone because it marks valuable time. He’ll give the t-shirts to Goodwill. The random webpages have long turned to dust.

The insignificant possessions and stream of small distractions, the unimportant tasks and sinkhole of rumination — all of it killed my precious time.

What mattered was the time spent with loved ones, the work toward important goals, the real education and knowledge-building, and the purposeful giving to others. This is what makes an exquisitely bright star.

A well-lived life is unique to each of us, but it sits on a foundation of awareness in the moment and choosing wisely. I know this. I’m trying. It’s day by day — and it’s a huge win when I notice that day. It’s worth everything.

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Have a wise and wonderful week, friends.