Bright Shards of Glass

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.

Henry Ward Beecher

It's dusk here, on a cool, breezy summer evening. Longer days and brighter light characterize this time of year in our part of the world. I find midsummer challenging - social activities, heat, the diminished hours of darkness and a flurry of demands. I've been unwell on and off for a month, and unable to push myself along this current as in past years. It's been a relief.

For most of my life, I've thought about time like a sliding puzzle - the ones filled with little squares that must be rearranged to reveal a picture, or a series of numbers. Time is made of chunks I need to move around in order to get everything to fit, to make sense. So often (almost every day) I end up feeling that I've failed in this attempt, and I determine to try harder. I've reached a level of weariness that I can no longer ignore. My body is offering me an invitation to slow down enough to really find the rest I need.

In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist says this: "The idea of time as a thing leads ineluctably to the idea of time as a resource...we are all encouraged...therefore to rush our lives indiscriminately in order to pack 'more' into it." He notes that this "leads us to feel we are always running against the clock, running after things and snatching them hastily, putting them in our little - always too little - bag of time." He reminds his readers that "our most profound needs, those for closeness, care, love and appreciation of the good things in life, as well as of one another, depend on slowness in human relations."

He asserts that time is an indivisible flow, inextricable from life as lived in the body, not a series of points along a line. Like a river, there is no "here" that isn't in constant flux and change. He references music: it is possible to read the notes on a page, but in order for those notes to make sense, they must be played, and no one note makes sense on its own. Each note is part of the ones that came before, and makes meaning of the ones that come after. The representation on paper (like the seconds, minutes and hours of a clock) is simply that - a representation. Music is embodied, in the hands of the artist playing a piano, the body of the dancer swaying to its tune, the ears listening to the melody, the feelings the sounds evoke.

From this perspective, time cannot be divided from life, and is a current in which we are immersed, not something we manipulate in the ways we so often we imagine we can do (as in the metaphors of spending, wasting, or losing time). These metaphors are helpful in ordering our days, and most of us would be hard pressed to live meaningfully in the world we inhabit now, without the notion of discrete units of time.

I want to live with an awareness of both. I have to function in days measured less by the seasons, or the rhythms of light and dark, and more by the demands of time represented by the hands of a clock. But I'm no longer willing to keep sliding little squares of my life around. I like Beecher's thoughts, quoted above. Perhaps I can see time more like a kaleidoscope, in which a shift in perception rearranges the patterns. The kaleidoscope also contains a limited number of little pieces, but they can break and reform in myriad ways, unlike the small squares of the sliding puzzle, bounded by a frame and fitting only in one place. I leave you with a poem I wrote recently.

Kaleidoscope

Closing one eye,

I look through the lens

with the other, lift the tube

to the pale dawn slanting

through the window. Turning

the worn ring at the far end,

I see a circle of broken light,

scattered with shards

of bright glass, settling

with a soft click.

I shift my hand clockwise;

the pieces of glass collapse

into each other, reappear, slip,

crack open into new patterns.

The world outside tilts, shadowed

outlines of trees shimmer into

dimension and colour, in the rising sun.

I wish you a holiday season in which you experience the days as "bright shards of glass," full of possibility and joy.

With appreciation,

Carri.

P.S. You will find my latest Cloudlight post here, and my latest wellness post, A Silent Boundary, here.