I smiled to myself while driving home after work, admiring my squeegee job I just did on my windshield while getting gas—I had to use the hard edges just to get off the guts from a cloud of bugs I had driven through the day before. Ah, life is good, done work, finally driving home, looking at the blue sky through my squeaky clean windsh—SPLAT. Seriously? Two minutes of clean windshield and already, it was over.

Sometimes I find myself trying to mentally resist the passage of time when things are good. Maybe if I just squint hard enough?

I think back to times as simple as being at a party. What a terrific high, I don’t want this to end! I’m chatting (yelling) with people at the party, sipping (gulping) my drink, and gliding effortlessly (stumbling) through the crowd. Wait, why are both my hands empty? How long has it been since I’ve had a drink? Ack, was that just a sober thought I had? Soon, I’d be gliding again (crashing) through the crowd. “Anyone seen a half bottle of pear cider? Anyone?” Ah, there it is, on the coffee table; my sweet elixir that blurs the edges of time and keeps me floating on this high. For those of you who’ve been there before, we know what this desire to hold onto the high in an unconstructive manner does: it gifts us with a horrible hangover and embarrassing memories, if we’re lucky enough to remember the prior evening at all.

But what about those times when we’re more than happy that time has passed?

In the midst of a feeling-like-my-life-would-soon-end contraction, while giving birth to my first child, I recall wishing I had a time machine. Please, please just put time on fast forward to where I’m sitting peacefully with my newborn. Stress-laden sweat dripped down my face, not knowing when it would all end, as my husband rubbed my back as though sanding the bark off a log until I respectfully told him to Stop goddammit!

It seems whether we’re attempting to chain time to a chair in our home or pushing it rudely out our front door, anxiety is present.

In preparation for my second delivery, I read a midwifery book. The author stated that reminding oneself that the pain is temporary can be helpful. (I also recall the recommendation to flutter your lips like a horse because when one orifice relaxes, so do the others. And yet another recommendation was to have your partner titillate your nipples… okay, I’m a hippie at heart, but I would have decked my husband had he tried the latter and thankfully, that’s not his idea of good timing for foreplay.) So there I was, pushing and making horse sounds as my nine pound son came out my Johnny Cash Ring of Fire. Reminding myself of the advice that the pain is temporary, I muttered between gritted teeth, “This soon shall pass, this soon shall pass, this soon shall PAAAAASSSSSS, OH MOTHER OF GOD HELP ME!” I actually think it worked.

Hmm, this too shall pass. It reminds us that, in good times or bad, if nothing else, we can rely on change, the passage of time. It relates to the concept of impermanence that I read much of in Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart”. Even if we were to sit in a dark room and do nothing, time would still pass, we just can’t avoid it. Why does that make me so queasy? Perhaps part of it is acknowledging the inevitable end we’re all headed for… okay, let’s keep this light, shall we?

On Quora.com Peter Baskerville speaks to the proverb this too, shall pass and states that, “[it] has the ability to make the happy person sad and the sad person happy because of the realization that both the ‘best and worst of times’ will soon pass.” This made me think about how much I really need to value my now. Midlife urges us to do this much more than when we were younger. I thought it was so cliché when older people would look at me and say, “You just wait, before you know it, you’ll be old like me.” I recall squinting at their wrinkled faces and thinking Ha, that’s an eternity away!

So a few months ago, when I was preparing to drive to Vancouver to see two beautiful girlfriends of mine, one who I hadn’t seen in a ridiculous amount of years, I decided to be conscious of the passage of time.

My immediate response, we’ll call it Voice #1, said, “Come on Nicole, don’t get all new age introspective on yourself, just have fun and don’t let this hippie-dippy bullshit dampen your time!”

Voice #2: “No really, this is good, if you’re conscious that this will be over before you know it, you’re really going to dive in and live in the moment.”

For those of you who know me well, you know which voice I chose to listen to.

So there I was, about to hit the open road, telling myself that before I knew it, the weekend would be done and I would be driving home, fun over. Seriously? But this temporary dive into the shits was interrupted by my focus on climbing into my van, travel mug filled with Timmie’s, audiobooks spread out on the passenger seat, and a container of sushi to satiate my hunger until I got there. Fffffunn! How often did I get this time to myself, even just for the drive? Boring or lonely might be the words that enter the mind of a child or teenager on a long, solo trip, but for me, this was heaven in a minivan.

I left my city with some slight anxiety as I always do when I leave my kids. What if one of them gets hurt and needs a mom hug? What if the apocalypse happens and I’m stuck in a different city? What if my husband is an axe murderer and his plan to take them on a hike ends badly? After purging all my what-ifs, I was cruising the highway with a large grin while Shonda Rhimes read aloud her book “Year of Yes” (insightful, funny book, btw). Each time a bug hit the window, I shrugged and said, “Meh, impermanence.” (Okay, when a big bug splatted directly in my line of vision, I may have left grip indents in my steering wheel and let some unbecoming words fly, but I’m really particular about my windshield as you may have ascertained from the beginning of this blog.) Soon, I was sucking back my last sip of coffee, eating my last piece of sushi, losing my bladder-is-empty sensation and listening to the end Shonda’s first audiobook CD, all while being conscious of my slight irritation with each.

Over our first cocktails at my girlfriend’s house, I brought this whole impermanence thing up with them. The first thing our hostess brought up was her growing children.

“Yup, I get it,” I said. “Our kids will be graduating before we know it, it’s crazy.”

A look of dread spread across her face. “I know, how do I hold onto it?”

She and I are the kind of moms who totally get why people have their kids shacked up in their basements, rent-free (I have the sense my practical girlfriend may even lean this way also, a true softy). I mean, make them take out the garbage and cook some meals, and then kick them out at thirty-five, just in time to find a partner and procreate.

The matter-of-fact one of our trio (you can only imagine she offers great balance to the hostess and I), shrugged and said, “You can’t.” That was it? You can’t?

She’s right, we can’t, but isn’t there a way around it? I put forth theories of taking photos so it’s easier to throw sentimental objects away. (In my world, I secretly say thank you to, and kiss, any object that has been in my household for more than six months, which could be anything from an empty tube of toothpaste to a hole-ridden sock.)

And then, as we listened to our hostess’s incredibly talented son play us a song on the piano, our hostess wondered aloud what it will be like when the sound of his beautiful piano playing wouldn’t flood the house any longer.

“You could pay him to live at home,” I joked. Kinda. She looked hopefully at me as though that could be a credible option.

“It can be hard to let go of some of the things that are gone,” she said. “Like our college years in our dorm or my old house I grew up in. Man, I miss those. I put them away in my special memory box and it helps me to let them go, but know the memories are still there if I want to revisit them. If I don’t do that, if I keep dwelling on what’s passed, it can make me batty.”

The next night, we headed to a martini bar. As I walked in, I took in the smell of the sizzling appetizers, the sound of the live guitar, and the sight of my girlfriends’ smiles and dolled-up selves. I reflected on one of my favorite excerpts from Walden by Henry David Thoreau (I won’t act all English-lit-professor-like as though I’ve read the book, I heard it from one of my favorite movies, Dead Poets Society):

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…

So I got all Spartan-like and sucked hard until I was full. (Okay, that sounded bad on many possible fronts, but you know what I mean. And my mouth may have sucked hard on some martinis too, but not to the point of morning-after regret, I’ve learned a bit from my earlier days… most of the time.) And when I departed from my two friends the next morning, I felt just that: full.

Driving home, my windows down, hair whipping in the wind (okay, the windows were down because my A/C wasn’t working and it was pissing me off because I couldn’t hear my audiobooks over the roaring air nor see the road well as my hair slapped my face like Medusa’s snakes when they’re on a tear) I reflected on the weekend. It’s done, it’s really done, just like I knew it would be, so quickly. But the beautiful thing about the passage of time is that next would come something new again. Time with my family, back to my job… which is old and yet new each time.

In Baskerville’s article, he also points out an excerpt from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, IF:

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same

I think what he’s saying is to let time pass as it should, through both the good and the bad; it’s the way we perceive (or refuse to perceive) the passage of time that can make it more or less painful, or more or less fulfilling. But alas, it’s a slow journey, we humans are such creatures of habit. My intention, however, is to become more mindful of when I’m trying to chain time to a chair or push time out the door… because what I’ve realized is that time is even more stubborn than I, and it will pass regardless… in its own time.

~

Credit to https://unsplash.com/@urosjovicic96 for cover photo.