It is February and I wake up every day with rain on the glass.
Most evenings I think about what to do the next day. How I might bookend my work day - both ways - with space that is meaningful to me. I spend some mornings drawing, some running, some writing. I tried walking to work once (it did not really work). I spend some evenings throwing pots, some meeting friends; and almost every evening finding a new part of the way to walk back to my flat. I am tired, but appease myself with the fact that I spend the good part of eight hours of the day sitting over my screen, and that I shall not then end the day sitting in the twilight of my little room doing the same.
This is the gift and burden of grief. I keep going even though I am exhausted. On Saturday the 10th it was decided that it was enough - I stayed in all day nursing a cold I must have given myself.
‘How do you pass the time?’
I met a lot of new people recently and have been asked this on more than one occasion. I have never liked this question because it implies time is something we have to get through. Sometimes it sounds almost hypothetical. Imagine all the time in the world - what are you going to do with it? I am liking it even less now because I took a moment yesterday to reflect on the past two weeks and it looks like that is all I have been doing. Just trying to pass the time. I gave it a piercing glare and my fiercest go at using it all up. I felt really grabby, callous even.
What shall we do with all of it? What even shall we do with half of it? I want be gentle and curious with time like I want to be with everything else in my life - how do I not see it as an ill to give succour to, or an unrest to share solace with?
Where is the mercy in the ceaseless clock? What is its truth - the warp and weft of its pace?
I mentioned this in passing to anyone who would listen, and a friend told me that time is dizzying and ruthless to me because at this point in my life I look upon it with lament for its intensity, the unrelenting heat of its fire. Some mirroring of self. So if I know it for what it was meant to be, perhaps I might start to live in a way that keeps time for what it is.
How do we enjoy time, then? I am convinced everything in life can be traced back to love. Does it become gift when we give it away? How can I live in the truth of knowing that what I have of it is enough? I don’t think it is trading currency. We must have it for reasons larger than an exchange.
It must grow us, somewhat. We live adrift in its rhythm — it must care for us, somehow.
Time, love’s trusted emissary. To have time is to be able to deepen love. To spend it is to lavish. I cannot pass it grasping, then - it is worth far too much for that.
I want to see it this way. Clearly and through the trees it is not for my own keeping. The buds of the London plane start to swell, limbs outstretched, slowly awakening.
I awake with it. If I lose time loving and giving I would have lost nothing at all.
With love
Chelsea