Commentary
Newsday
Time has been around longer than any of us can remember. You’d think with this kind of experience on the job, time would have found a greater sense of gentle efficiency, purpose and forgiveness. Instead, it has brazenly taken every opportunity to torment me. It may preach the opposite, in the “time heals all wounds” vein, but that has not been my experience.
In Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon and Garfunkel (and later the Bangles, pretty much the opposite of Simon and Garfunkel) said, “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…”. I do. I see it more clearly than I’d like to.
What, indeed, has become of me? Or even more to the point, what is yet to become of me? I’m not quite ready to join the Purple Hat school of philosophy. To me, wrinkles are still wrinkles and not laugh lines. I don’t think every mistake I make is a learning experience. And speaking of life experience, why is everyone so keen to get it? I would happily settle for a lot less experience and a little more floating on calm water looking at clouds.
I don’t have a fight with time. I wouldn’t dare. I have nothing but the greatest awe for it and its handmaidens: age, patience, infinity. I am not afraid of getting older. I’m already way past what I considered my expiration date. Patience is a fickle fiend. For some things I have none at all, for others too much.
And then there is infinity. What is infinity? Infinity is like God. If it’s bigger than anything to which we can compare it, how are we meant to understand it? Also, it’s the one thing that scares the bejesus out of me. Imagine anything – you, me, marmalade – being around always. Infinity is just more of everything. Wars, hunger, joy, stars, insomnia, John Wick movies, work, heartbreak. All of it. More of it.
These are terrible things to contemplate. Eons ago, the writer Wayne Brown told me he’d thought of doing maths as one of his A’ level subjects. During the first class the teacher said that parallel lines met at infinity. Wayne walked out and never looked back. You can’t inflict that kind of thing on 16-year-old students.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never – not for a single moment – wondered about the meaning of life. All my life, however, I’ve wondered why time and the passage thereof, were both incomprehensible and impossible to fight.
Time kills. We know we will die and that may or may not be the end of time for us (belief systems depending). Maybe things would have worked out differently for me if I’d not been raised Hindu and had a different father. A father who did not constantly remind us that as far as he knew, everything – every thought, feeling or excellent school reports – had all happened before and would all happen again. This, I think, is why I was not felled by Wayne’s parallel line story. I’d been prepared.
But whether or not we cease to be, time stomps on like a great big stomping thing. There’s a question out there about how one sees time. Some see a straight line. Some see a wavy graph. I see it as a series of bricks. Each brick is laid on top of me. Each brick is a second. Especially when I’m having one of my down days, I fancy I feel the weight of each moment. Carrying all that can do one of two things: it can make me really strong or it can crush me. Here too, time cannot make up its mind what it means to do to me.
When you look at the possibility of all things going on forever, the idea of time and its ameliorative effect on the beating the world gives us, is at once both the biggest and smallest thing on my mind. It is relatively small because the alwaysness is too vast to parse. But it is enormous because it is the most everyday of the things. I want it to heal. I want desperately not to dwell on slights and injuries. I want to reach for that most noble of things: forgiveness.
Time is not friendly to me. I harp and carp and more often than not I cannot make the pain go away. Perhaps you think I should be more proactive and do more to change various situations. I’ve tried. And tried. And time still presses on and weighs upon me. I can’t win.