It's my birthday!
PLUS: Mediations on time, and a trip to The Little League World Series.
I turn 39 today, so perhaps it’s fitting that I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I want time to feel slow and expansive. I want each day to feel justified on its own terms. I want the value of each activity to lie in the doing, not in the end result. That’s what Untangled has been for me. Not always — sometimes writing is the absolute worst — but on a good day, when I sit down at the keyboard, I enjoy the process, and it feels like flow.
It turns out, I’ve thought about time for a long time. Here’s what I wrote in a letter to my nephew Sam ten years ago, in celebration of his second birthday:
When you're in high school, 20-somethings will seem exciting. Some wear suits. They have jobs. Some might even have a career…But their eyes are just as eager to see what comes next. They escape from the present and turn their attention to the future tense: "when I finish school," "when I find a job I love," "when I get married," as if any of that is promised.
Well, at some point, the teeter-totter will tip in the other direction. You'll try to grab hold of time and slow it down. You'll want more time to discover your true passion, turn your career into a calling, find true love and friends that challenge you to be a better you. As these slip in and out of your fingers, you'll wonder if time is passing you by, if maybe these things are for other people, not you. Like Missy, you'll want to take time, flip it and reverse it. You'll get hung up on regret, thinking about the might-have-loved and the should-have-been.
Take my story, for example. Doing well in school always mattered to me. When grandma Mia told me that I could be whatever I wanted if I tried my best in school, I believed her. The more time I invested in school, the more doing well in school came to define me. Like an anchor, sometimes keeping me grounded, other times dragging me down. Here's the thing, Sam: This too was an escape from the present, from figuring out what really mattered to me, and acting on it. While I don't regret this -- I ultimately got into the graduate school I wanted and was lucky enough to find a job that gives me purpose -- doing well in school should have been justified on its own terms, in the moment. It should be about getting lost in another world and understanding your own as the pages turn. And yet I focused so intently on doing well in school that everything else -- everything that it turns out really matters in life like honest-to-god friends, figuring out what makes you tick and love defined by partnership -- got pushed to the side.
It's not that I didn't think these were important too, Sam. I did. It's that for too long I thought they would follow automatically, as if they were somehow guaranteed, a promised part of life. They're not. I've learned the hard way that you have to work harder at these than anything. But ‘when I’s’ ran rampant in my mind because I didn't want to admit to myself that maybe, possibly, I would grow old, alone, with a fancy degree, framed like it matters. Until one morning, sometime a year and a half ago, I woke up and realized that ‘when I’ is a crutch, that nothing is promised and everything that matters must be lived intentionally and authentically, that tomorrow is a fiction, and today -- right now, right this instant -- is what matters.
I didn’t abolish ‘when I’ thinking’ from my brain overnight. I’m still internalizing that realization from ten years ago and — slowly but surely — replacing a future orientation with a li’l more grounding in the present.
My nephew is now 12, and what matters right now is that he’s playing in The Little League World Series, and I’m going to be there to support him. If that’s not an activity that is justified on its own terms, I don’t know what is. It will look something like this:
Until next time,
Charley