Time

There are so many quotes about time and its fluid, ever-changing characteristics. I find myself thinking a lot about time today. How it drags or zips by, how it heals or creates scars, how everything changes given enough of it.

Life is what happens to you when you're busy planning other things. -John Lennon
It seems like forever that I have had the mindset that I will get x done as soon as y happens and y just doesn't happen. I will go back to school as soon as we can afford it: 14 years I said that. This year I put my foot down and made it happen. I'll have time to write as soon as I finish paying bills, chasing kids, clean the house, etc. All things that never quite get done and so if I want to write I have to set that aside and just do it. I'll start exercising as soon as the weather clears, but it is always too hot or too cold or too wet or I'm too busy. No wonder I'm fat and out of shape and generally disgusting.

The Shrink often advocates being mindful of the present and staying in the moment. It isn't just an important part of not dissociating. It's about watching the kids play their everyday games, noticing the expression on Hubby's face as he talks about his day, taking note of the details of the life that is all around me right now. Because if I am too busy double-checking next week's schedule, I'll miss today's golden moments.

Time flies when you're having fun and its twin A watched pot never boils
The other phrase that goes right along this one is "wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey stuff" (a quote from Doctor Who, of course, episode "Blink"). These observations about time highlight how my perception of time is not consistent at all. The time spent in a doctor's waiting room can be the exact same amount as the time spent engaged in interesting conversation but the former drags and drags while the later is over before I know it. Perhaps the secret to evening out the perceived pace of time is connected to mindful awareness. Finding the things that make that "long" wait unique and fascinating as well as taking the time to feel the awe and happiness in a pleasant conversation... it seems to me that these things would slow down the rushing train and speed up the infinite wait.

Time heals all wounds
This is a common platitude but I truly wonder if it has any merit at all. Just because it's been 15 years since I was betrayed by someone I trust doesn't mean that I've forgotten it or that it hurts any less. I think time may give us the distance we need to affect our own healing but I don't think it is the distance itself that does the healing. Unless it is intended in the same vein as All bleeding stops eventually and means that once you're dead you won't be hurting about incidents from high school.

Time has passed since the initial volcano between Uber-Bitch and me. I need a new euphemism for her since I no longer feel that red-hot anger and vicious pain. I don't know what to call her now. I can see where she is coming from and I can see where she is going and I hope that she never does to anyone else what she did here. No one needs that kind of pain, not her and not anyone else. I learned a lot from her and I'm grateful for that, even though not all of it turned out to be good lessons. There is no doubt that I will continue to struggle to find where her grains of truth end and the cognitive distortions begin, but eventually I think I will be able to tell the difference. In the meantime, Guardian Angel and The Shrink and Hubby and many others will continue to smack me upside the back of the head (Gibbs-ing me, as the kids say) to put things back into perspective. And lord help me, I will never break myself to rescue someone else again - people don't need to be rescued; they need to be helped. So time has passed and I still hurt and still get angry but it doesn't consume me anymore, permeating every area of my life and saturating it with unbearable emotions. Did time affect this change? No, I did - with a lot of help from my friends.

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings. - Jabberwocky (Lewis Carrol)
The walrus said this to the oysters to continue the deception he and Carpenter were perpetrating to lure the oysters from home and them eat them. He spoke of all those things to oysters to distract them from the fact that they were being eaten.

So many of the things I write, the posts that actually get completed, are of surface issues rather than the underlying causes. I speak about all the fires in my life that I rush around putting out, rather than finding the cause of all the fires springing up in the first place. And so it is with this post as well. I am rambling about time, sorting out the things that make it such a curious creature, without talking about the things that have made me examine time's characteristics. It's strange, for someone who claims to love writing as much as I do, there are so many things that I can't seem to actually give the power of words written or spoken aloud.

Habits are hard to change.