IMAGE: Propagation, 2018, 4″x4″, acrylic on canvas (14/365)
I was recently talking with my father about a sign my freshman-year geometry teacher had hanging beneath the clock in her classroom. It read: Time Will Pass. Will You? I think there was an issue with the punctuation, or maybe two question marks, or the block letters and fonts rankled my design sensibility somehow, but whatever it was, it drove me crazy every time I saw it. My father said his third grade teacher had a similar sign, with slightly different wording, and it bothered him in the same way. We both agreed that one of the most frustrating parts (besides teachers having nothing more clever to post under their clocks several decades later) was that we usually only noticed the sign when we weren’t watching the clock. It was more often the case that when the bell rang, I was so engrossed in the class that I looked over to check if it could possibly be over already. Or someone on that side of the room sneezed or dropped a book and I involuntarily looked over. The smug little sign greeted me with its menacing words, as if the only options in life were pass or fail, and I always felt like sneering back at it, “Yes, of course I will pass, and I will probably get an A or at the very least an A-minus!” (I used to be good at math).
High school battles with signage aside, time has always been a nemesis for me. I have spent much of my life willing it to go slower, stretch out, and give of itself more generously and expansively so that I can soak in as much of what I am experiencing as possible. When my friends were in a rush to turn seventeen and get their driver’s licenses, I didn’t mind being younger because it meant more time visiting with my family while they still gave me rides places. I rarely wanted classes to end, especially in college, since that was really the reason I had left home and lived in a dorm full of strangers, pretending I was adjusting well to people who looked down on me (or were utterly indifferent) while I wondered three times a week why the bathroom in the science building perpetually smelled of vomit. (Freshman year was a mixed bag.)
Even when I am anticipating something exciting or looking forward to relief at the end of a challenge, I am careful not to wish for time to accelerate. One of the purposes of meditation is to fix time in the present by focusing on breathing and being completely in a moment. But sometimes I catch myself more looking forward to how focused and centered I will feel when meditation is over than actually doing the work to get there. I eat slowly so I can savor food, I look all around as I walk, and I try to take my time with whatever I am doing so I know I did it mindfully. The same is true with love and any pleasure – I don’t want to rush to a high point and find I was wishing my life away.
Intensifying, 2018, 9”x12”, wax and charcoal on paper (4/365)
A huge expanse of time can feel like a weight too heavy to carry. The first time my high school boyfriend broke up with me, I was so devastated that I didn’t know how I would survive time going forward. Cataclysmic events tend to cleave time into the Before and After, and to my teenage sensibility, this was the cruelest blow the sword of time had ever dealt. I imagined him going out with the new girl, the seasons changing as he transitioned from cross-country running to wrestling to spring track, the years adding up as he got his license, went off to college, and made a whole life without me. And I would be stuck, being with myself, as the person he didn’t want. I couldn’t imagine any future where I was happy, where I would ever stop hurting and get past the heartbreak, let alone one where I would be fine, meet one of my best friends while sniveling about it, or that the boyfriend and I would eventually get back together and I’d return the favor of breaking up with him for someone else a few years later.
I remember staring at the taunting clock sign in geometry class in those days with eyes puffy and sore from crying in the girls room, wishing I could escape time. I wanted to sink under water or slip into a coma for a while and only wake up when the world had changed enough around me that everything that hurt had become irrelevant, or I finally stopped hurting, as everyone promised I would with time. I snapped out of that ridiculous fantasy when I realized that to escape the pain of that breakup, I’d also miss being with my family, visiting our extended relatives on the holidays, major chunks of the short lives of our pets, and short-term things like post-prom parties or listening to a new Counting Crows album when it first came out at the same time as everyone else. I didn’t really want to escape time, just avoid hurting, and I learned for the first of many times in my life that the only way out, always, is through.
Loose Threads, 2018, 9″x12″, permanent marker on paper (11/365)
Lately I’ve found myself both trapped by and clinging to time again. Being a woman in my 30s is to be bound by reproductive time limits, whether my heart or dating life are in the place they need to be or not. My student loan debt and any attempt to save for a house or family or retirement are fundamentally at odds in an inverse relationship with time and each other. At my last office job, I simultaneously felt like I never had enough time to breathe or do anything at home, and like I was staring at the clock every day wondering how I would get through the week. I was wishing my life away while lamenting it was slipping out of my grasp.
Over the past year since the 2016 election, I cannot count how many times I’ve thought and said, “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this.” Consciously I know there will be more life on the other side of this administration, but my mind cannot envision an America that survives it. I’ve begged the universe to fix time, or let me escape it, so I could go through quickly without feeling. The timeline I have been neglecting is once again my own, as the world spins off its axis and I look around feeling helpless and paralyzed with concern and fear. My father has reminded me repeatedly, “It happened. This is life right now. You can either spend the next few years miserable, or you can live your life the best you can.” My mother always adds, “And fight to make things better.”
Eons, 2018, 11″x14″, acrylic and ink on paper (15/365)
After the disasters that struck my family and friends this fall, paired with some heavy personal stuff, I sunk into a pretty intense period of mourning and depression that is only just abating. I didn’t mean to disappear, but time got away from me like it does. I am currently working to shift from a mindset that utterly dreads the future to one that embraces each day. It shouldn’t be as hard as it’s been, but I have never had an easy relationship with time. Some holes take longer than others to dig yourself out of.
At the turn of the new year, for the second time in a row I landed more uncomfortably on the side of “Good riddance to last year!” than “Welcome the new year!” I am exhausted of feeling bleak and hopeless, cringing through good times because I fear they are fleeting, and putting everyone on hold in case something awful comes up that I need to be prepared to face. I want to have hope again, even if that hope is simply in time. It will pass, and I have control over what I do in it.
I started a project that is both a challenge and a promise to myself, to make art every day this year (posting on my Instagram if you’d like to follow along). It has already made the passage of time bearable, stamping each day with an image I made and a promise that I will make more. It’s working remarkably well as self-prescribed art therapy because it is forcing me to be aware in time instead of going numb. Each day brings me further from the world inhabited by the people I lost last year, but it also brings me closer to a future I need to make bright, even if they are not here with me in it. I owe them that.
For the rest of my life, I am still charged with the double-edged sword of how I spend my time and how it spends me. I need to use it well.