A Matter of Time
There’s something almost mystical about this time of year, the shorter days, cooler air, falling leaves. It’s my second-favorite time of the year—winter is my favorite, which is fortunate, because it lasts about six months where I live now. There’s something at once profound and comfortably predictable about the changing of the seasons, the cycle, another year.
People, especially we denizens of western civilization, are often linear critters. Things had a beginning and will have an end. Life is a journey from birth to death to whatever comes after that (I don’t pretend to know). We mark off lives in time relative to predictable expectations and norms and “acting our age.” I am entering what is called “middle age,” bringing with it the expectation that my life is halfway between its beginning and its end, as well as expectations about what I should or shouldn’t do. This linear story often has “high points” and “low points,” an expectation of “glory days” and “good times” (usually in the younger years) and a long, steady decline full of anxiety, nostalgia, and reaction beginning around 40. Is this why middle-aged people so often start thinking the world is coming to an end?
A civilization of linear critters would be expected to be both terrified of death, reverent of youth, uncomfortable with old age—focused on tasks to be done and schedules to maintain, on beauty, strength, and material accomplishment above wisdom and self-knowledge. In such a world, I should be reminiscing this month. Twenty years ago this month, I was recording my first solo album. I was a college student, major undeclared, still reeling from the events of 9/11 but focused nonetheless on my creative endeavors. I was young and in love and healthy and strong and working at a café for 8 bucks an hour. Ten years ago this month was likely the “high point” of my music career, and in the months that followed, I played some my biggest (and last) shows to date.
I’m supposed to look back on these “high points” of my life, these “golden ages,” not pieces of an incomplete and still-unfolding story from the past, but as the “best it ever was.” If I didn’t think of those days fondly lately, I wouldn’t have mentioned them. But I reject the cult of nostalgia, the expectation that the good times and the glory days belong largely to those dizzy and confusing younger years. I am in better shape mentally now than I ever was back then and see no reason (other than a lot of hard work ahead and the ever-present possibility of unexpected illness or injury) to think I couldn’t be in better physical shape than I’ve ever been, too. I teach and write and do a lot of things I love to do, I’m happily married and have, after over a decade of college, landed a job I really enjoy. I have, honestly, also been picking up the old electric guitar again lately, but I don’t want to “relive the past”—life now is new and different, and I like it.
What is there to fondly remember? When it all boils down, it’s the people, the interactions and the relationships that evoke the nostalgia. The person I was ten, twenty years ago—he was kind of a mess. Why long for that? Why not look forward to what is better, could be better? Why the hell should anyone ever have to “act their age” anyway, and what does that even mean? I refuse to submit to this linear understanding, this cult of nostalgia, as I grow older. Things are pretty good now, and I entertain the possibility—work actively toward the possibility—that there are even better things to look forward to. Because life isn’t traced down a line from birth to death, with a high point in youth followed by a long, steady decline. Being alive is being a complex system, a series of cycles, little things and big things that change and unfold, good or bad, some gradual and predictable, others, abrupt and catastrophic.
I don’t like endings—not because I fear them (though of course I do) but because thinking about them puts me back on that linear track—I prefer cycles, but not a single cycle so much as a bunch of smaller interlocking cycles. Linear time is how we impose order on complexity. But the world is so much more than that, so much more than beginnings and ends, let alone “middle age.” I’m not going to spend the rest of my life, however long or short my remaining time is, dwelling on fears of tomorrow or dreaming fondly of returning to idealized lost yesterdays. Our understanding of time is, to some extent, an arbitrary social construction—why can’t it be otherwise? Why shouldn’t it be otherwise?
Image Credit: Gooseberry River, photo by Lukas Szrot, October 2021.
