Nobody's Lives Stood Still

Happy New Year, everybody. I made the decision to travel for the holidays, so I’ve only just recently flown back to Seattle¹ and begun settling back into the comfortable routines that time spent in other people’s homes—even ones I once lived in, too—necessarily shake me out of for a while.

The thing about living all the way across the country from everyone in your immediate family (and most of your extended family) is that there becomes a real pressure to maximize your time on those occasions when you do get back to your hometown. I don’t even mean that in an unhealthy way, necessarily, although I am sure there are plenty of you out there who are forced to experience it that way. It’s just sort of baked in. You and all the people you love are only granted so much time together on this earth and the math starts to get a little anxiety-inducing when you start multiplying years by number of visits per year by number of days per visit.

This can be tough for someone like me, who generally only has the mental and physical energy to do, like, one or two non-routine things per day. I love a good nap and I am not what you would call efficient. Plus I don’t know that any of us are all that good at squaring the latent urgency of the larger and more frightening existential certainties with the fleeting needs of our day-to-day lives.²

But time marches on, doesn’t it? And we all have to reckon with that and make our peace, or else make the effort to chew our allotted days down to the marrow. Between my last visit in August and this Christmas trip, my tiny niece and nephew lived 13% and 44% more of their short lives, respectively. They are brand new people in many ways each time I see them anew, and I am both delighted and terrified by that, even though I know it won’t always be true, or at least not as dramatically true.

It is perhaps fitting that I spent so much time during my visit listening to Margo Cilker’s new album Pohorylle (which made my end-of-year-good-things list last week). My favorite tune, “Wine in the World,” has some lines that express these irresolvable tensions perfectly.

A funny thing happened this last time I was out traveling
Nobody's lives stood still
My grandfather tended to his bees and his garden
And we lost him on the first of the year
I'm a woman split between places
I'm gonna lose loved ones on both sides
It's my life, I can relate, participate
I just wish I just had more time

I just wish I just had more time. It’s another one of those failure-to-square-existential-knowledge-with-daily-life things, I think. I am fond of Swedish philosopher Martin Hagglund, who contends that life only has meaning at all because of its finitude:

…part of what makes a love relationship meaningful and significant is precisely that it can be lost, that it’s something you only have a precious limited time to devote yourself to, and that this knowledge informs how you sustain it together…it’s not just that eternal life is unattainable. It’s actually undesirable, because if you remove the possibility of death you also remove life, if you remove the possibility of grief you also remove joy. These things go together.

Ursula Le Guin wrote about this, too, in The Dispossessed:

All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die, how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?

I find nothing to argue with in any of those words—even as, well, I find myself wishing I had more time.

How do you resolve the irresolvable? How do you live a life that keeps both you and everyone you care about as happy as possible, when some of those things will necessarily be in conflict? I suppose the answer is that you don’t, although paradoxically you also must never stop trying for it, understanding that this kind of balanced happiness is not a benchmark to be achieved but a lifelong journey to be undertaken.

If that’s too philosophically messy, there’s always the thoughtful solution Oliver Sacks proposed to his parents when he was raising hell all over the globe as a young man:

As for the other intangible and incalculable things you have given me, I can only repay these by leading a fairly happy and useful life, keeping in touch with you, and seeing you when I can.

In my experience the best resolutions—New Years’ or otherwise—are not made of hard metrics, but in targets of More or Less, which allow us to orient our lives toward what’s important to us without falling into the trap of thinking that a year is something one can fail at. That’s how I’d like to start my 2022: in contemplation of and in contact with the people and places that are really important to me, seeing them when I can, and in between, doing my best to lead a fairly happy and useful life.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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1. And boy, are my arms tired!

2. I think this is true of our mortality and also true of things like climate change. “Well yes, this is a horrifying eventuality to contemplate, but today I have two meetings and have to go to the store and pick up my dry cleaning and I said I would call my aunt at 4:30…so what am I supposed to do about it right now?”