Chasing Time

Days sometimes feel like a race against an emptying hourglass, each passing hour a nagging reminder of tasks left undone.

But yesterday morning, I did something different. Instead of diving headfirst into my usual pace, I quietly slipped on my shoes before the household stirred. I stepped outside into the cool fall air and began walking—straight through the forest and toward the edge of the ocean, a short distance from our home. I watched my feet as they negotiated tree roots and mud puddles, all the while preoccupied with the stream of tasks and to-dos swirling through my head.

About ten minutes in, I felt something pull my attention upward. The forest called to me through birdsongs and rustling branches. “Wake up! Lift your head! Look up!” it demanded. I tilted my face to the sky and felt something shift. Time—this thing I was used to chasing—expanded and swelled in all directions, vast and resounding. Suddenly, like waking from a dream that moments before felt very real, the plans and tasks dissipated. My mind tried to keep going (it had important things to do!), but the trees, the wind, the birds, and the sky held their ground and swelled even louder. I sensed the trees laugh with kind pity: “Oh, you silly human, with your thoughts and your plans.”

I recently listened to an interview with Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta. He explained how, in his people’s language, time is only spoken about in connection to place. So, when you plan to meet someone, for example, you don’t say what time you are meeting but rather where you are meeting them. So steeped was I in a concept of linear time that I couldn’t grasp this when I heard it. Wasn’t time a fixed measurement? Something that organized our actions and obligations, giving us something universal to reference? How could knowing where you were meeting someone give an indication of when?

But standing there yesterday among the trees, I felt the truth of this infinite wisdom: that real time only exists here and now. It is a thing so vast and expansive that it cannot be controlled, as much as we try. All we can do is step into the stream and welcome its invitation to co-create. This looks like holding our plans loosely, tuning into the invitations of each moment, and trusting that it leads us somewhere beyond what our minds can conceive of.

When I look back at the sum of my life, I hope that I will have said yes more than no to the invitation to be here. Even for the hard parts, the messy parts, and the seemingly mundane parts.

Being A Body

For as long as I can remember, I had a voice in my head—a constant narrator overlaying every moment with its interpretations of my life. Sometimes it simply talked through what was happening. More often, it flitted between anticipating future scenarios and referencing past experiences. Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of things to quiet the voice—from meditation to therapy. At best, those methods gave me short (minute-long) breaks from the judgmental arbiter. Mostly, it just kept on, steadfast and undisturbed. This narrator has been so ever-present that I did not know it was possible to live without its constant humming chatter.

And then something happened that completely rewired the circuitry of my system: I birthed a child. Somewhere between bearing, birthing, and now caring for my daughter, the narrator took a backseat. It’s as if all of the extra space and time my mind had to ruminate, consider, dream, or even worry were commandeered by the constant demands and interruptions of caring for her. I think back to the first day home from the hospital with a brand-new infant and how quickly my senses attuned to her every sound and sensation. Any sound morning and night, however small, could spring me into quick response. There was no time to think, let alone to overthink—especially about anything that did not have to do with her.

Before this shift, I related to my body as the external vessel for the “me” inside. But after the transition to motherhood, I finally experienced what some people called “embodiment.” For me, it has meant moving with instinct, from the visceral, and through sensation. I haven’t needed to “understand” from my mind or have words or explanations in order to act. My body has been instinctual and wise in its responses.

When they do come, words are often inadequate to the task. How do you put into words the feeling of a child’s movement in your womb? Or the painful relief of milk letting down at the mere remembrance of your child? Or the simultaneous heart-swells and heartache of watching your child outgrow themself out of recognition, week after week? The vastness and depth of these experiences exist on another plane, where words are mere shadows of truths. Attempting to describe them is like trying to catch ghosts with mason jars. How do you bottle something as ephemeral and expansive as this?

Motherhood has given me what all those years I spent trying to quiet my mind couldn’t. This has felt freeing. Without the mental bandwidth to regret or ruminate, I find myself living more in the present moment than I ever have before.

What I did not anticipate, however, was how much I would miss my mind. Despite its overbearing nature, its sense-making helped me feel safe, directed, and oriented in this vast cosmos of mayhem. Sure, it could be a worrywart and a killjoy, but it was always at work steadying me in a story of who I was and where I was going. Without this, I have found myself untethered, like a sailboat whose path is directed by the whims of every passing gust.

This is what brings me to write—an attempt to find the words, however inadequate. Maybe if I can find the words, I can start to piece together a tapestry of meaning from this new place, as both a body and a mind. Perhaps this will help me make sense of myself, reconciling who I was with who I am. From this new place, maybe a path ahead will reveal itself.