Again and again JoAnne and I have tried to get our heads around this event that's is bearing down on us, my leaving for 27 months. It's daunting. We don't have the bandwidth. She said this morning as we scurried around each other getting breakfast, "I can't imagine your coming home in two years." She meant she couldn't imagine what it would be like, my coming home, arriving, standing here in the kitchen again, going to the bedroom, splitting wood in the yard. Conversations like this spring up out of nowhere (nowhere? isn't that like saying the explosion just came out of nowhere after having assembled the explosives, laid them into the wall and lit the fuse?...and so, apparently much of this experience will be about expanding perspective.)
"I know," I said. "I can't imagine it either."
Then, in a flash of insight I said, "I won't be coming home."
"I won't be here." She said.
"That's the point of all this," I said. And it is. I--the self writing this, the one just over the mental problems and the one with the habits who believes in a big breakfast and who has chips on his shoulders about so many things, who likes this and doesn't like that, won't be coming home. Or, at least, we hope he won't be. We're both looking forward to me being a different person, keeping the things we like, those aspects of me that work well, having grown out of and left behind those aspects we don't like, that I, especially, don't like, that don't work well, that keep me back from expanding into the world as my truer self. And similar is true for JoAnne. A different JoAnne will be here and a different me will be walking down the driveway in 2 years time, June (or so) 2013. We wonder who those people will be and this is no small source of trepidation.
Those numbers, that date, doesn't make much sense right now. It, too, is something I will have to grow into. It will come nevertheless just as March 1st is coming at its steady rate. All that will happen but as noted earlier, time is doing some strange things, its tick and tock slurred and unreliable. I can no longer rely on the clock to tell me as much as I thought it did before Christmas, before the blue package landed on my desk and took it up and decided to believe in it.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
the acceleration of time due to (apparent) gravity
It sounds like physics, doesn't it. Given that physics is our account of the universe through observation and independently reproducible experiment, the physics to which the title of this post refers is a personal physics. I'm betting each of us has one and that in such a case as mine. If (and when) you put yourself in my place, see if you don't discover the same things happening to you.
Time is accelerating, at least mine appears to be. March 2nd is coming at me like a train. When it hits it will absorb me and take me with it into a new dimension. It's a little unnerving. I think I've done this before but can't remember when. There are dates I know when such a thing should have happened, such as the start of an extended bicycle tour--over two years long--but circumstances were different. I was a different person then.
I have been changing my life. I've had to and it sometimes feels as though I am losing that life. There is the necessary clean out of desks and of table tops where detritus of my old life rests, the papers and clippings archived there as nature does, chronologically, oldest on the bottom, everything saved in case it's needed someday. It appears that day has past.
Also there are the e-mails I have to delete from my account and websites that have snuck in through cookies and other means that have been oddly comfortable. Who doesn't want to hear from LL Bean or Campmor once in a while though I don't remember actually signing up for these newsletters. Or the notices from my high school and college, those growing in number in recent months. The groups and clubs to which I belong. Facebook. Facebook: that cloying, mommy-hug, sense one gets from facebook asking if I would like a new friend. That one makes me shiver and I'm happy to have the excuse to step away from it. I am backing out from all of them because I likely won't have Internet access that will enable me to manage--i.e. delete--the hundreds of messages I'll have in my inbox when I sign in once in a while. Just family and friends--if that's possible--if I want half a change of keeping up.
Just as cleaning out a desk has a sadness to it and also a relief and the excitement of a clean and clear start, so has this process. I find, uneasily, that I have become used to going on-line each morning (Sunday's, too) to 25 to 50 new messages. Most of them I delete, of course, but it's become a habit...and an intrusion. I find this drift to having my time directed to the computer every day to see ads I never asked for an insult. it's my computer, not theirs, and it's my e-mail account, both of which I pay for...and now it will stop. This, too, will be refreshing. It will be a welcome step back to the way I was before e-mail. Back then, I had more time.
So this is about management, something I have been bad at for my entire life thus far. Perhaps it's time to learn to recognize what's important to me and to discard the rest. In short, to take [back] control of my life.
And I am a little wary of losing the scant ability at "the computer" I have. It will spin away from me and I am going to have to let it go. I suppose when I get back in two + years, it'll be a new and faster Internet driven world and I'll have to either leave it alone or come up to the new speed, pick it up then. But this sense I have now of all this flying out of control is worth noting. I don't know what to do about it but let's just put it on the wall as an occasional reminder. There is the positive sense in all this that I will also be gaining both my time and control over my life back.
Time is accelerating, at least mine appears to be. March 2nd is coming at me like a train. When it hits it will absorb me and take me with it into a new dimension. It's a little unnerving. I think I've done this before but can't remember when. There are dates I know when such a thing should have happened, such as the start of an extended bicycle tour--over two years long--but circumstances were different. I was a different person then.
I have been changing my life. I've had to and it sometimes feels as though I am losing that life. There is the necessary clean out of desks and of table tops where detritus of my old life rests, the papers and clippings archived there as nature does, chronologically, oldest on the bottom, everything saved in case it's needed someday. It appears that day has past.
Also there are the e-mails I have to delete from my account and websites that have snuck in through cookies and other means that have been oddly comfortable. Who doesn't want to hear from LL Bean or Campmor once in a while though I don't remember actually signing up for these newsletters. Or the notices from my high school and college, those growing in number in recent months. The groups and clubs to which I belong. Facebook. Facebook: that cloying, mommy-hug, sense one gets from facebook asking if I would like a new friend. That one makes me shiver and I'm happy to have the excuse to step away from it. I am backing out from all of them because I likely won't have Internet access that will enable me to manage--i.e. delete--the hundreds of messages I'll have in my inbox when I sign in once in a while. Just family and friends--if that's possible--if I want half a change of keeping up.
Just as cleaning out a desk has a sadness to it and also a relief and the excitement of a clean and clear start, so has this process. I find, uneasily, that I have become used to going on-line each morning (Sunday's, too) to 25 to 50 new messages. Most of them I delete, of course, but it's become a habit...and an intrusion. I find this drift to having my time directed to the computer every day to see ads I never asked for an insult. it's my computer, not theirs, and it's my e-mail account, both of which I pay for...and now it will stop. This, too, will be refreshing. It will be a welcome step back to the way I was before e-mail. Back then, I had more time.
So this is about management, something I have been bad at for my entire life thus far. Perhaps it's time to learn to recognize what's important to me and to discard the rest. In short, to take [back] control of my life.
And I am a little wary of losing the scant ability at "the computer" I have. It will spin away from me and I am going to have to let it go. I suppose when I get back in two + years, it'll be a new and faster Internet driven world and I'll have to either leave it alone or come up to the new speed, pick it up then. But this sense I have now of all this flying out of control is worth noting. I don't know what to do about it but let's just put it on the wall as an occasional reminder. There is the positive sense in all this that I will also be gaining both my time and control over my life back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)