This Is The Pace Of Reverence

Time's running out and I don't know what to do about that.

When I was in high school I was something of a disorganized mess. Levels of executive functioning that apparently came effortlessly to my peers eluded me; I can’t count the days when I learned on the bus or loitering in the foyer or in the hall between classes that there was a test that day, or a paper due, or something else that had completely escaped my notice. I was smart enough to be a good student but lacking the tools to be a great one. As such it felt for years as though my classmates were often in on some joke from which I was excluded. The panic of having failed to prepare, of being out of time to do something important, is a feeling I am intimately familiar with.

For the past week and a half I have been laid up with my first-ever bout of COVID. Nasty stuff. This would be a bummer in ordinary times—I had to miss the wedding of two good friends this past weekend—but coming, as it has, in my last few weeks of living in Seattle, it has caused me no end of anxiety and panic about what all I want and need to do before I depart for good.

I have a whole bar-and-restaurant bucket list that I haven’t even scratched the surface of. My “to-hike” list (much like my “to-read” list) was always going to have more items on it than it would be feasible to finish, but it has really taken a beating with this new obstacle in place. I get winded walking around the block, currently—how am I supposed to get up and down a few more remote mountain passes in the scant weeks I have left? There is so little time to visit my favorite friends, trees, overlooks, parks, and coffeeshops, and with each new day of my confinement another irrevocable chunk is carved away.

David Foster Wallace once wrote that you should “try to let what is unfair teach you.” I am willing to do that. But damn, it better be a good lesson to make all this feel worth it.

I think one of the things that aggravates me most is that when I do get healthy I’m going to have to race to cram all these things in, instead of taking them at their own speed. I have talked before about wanting to pay deeper attention to things, which is one of the reasons I love going to the woods so much. “This is the pace of reverence—the slow speed necessary for noticing,” writes Marion Renault, describing the steady crawl of botanists trying to find proof of an elusive variety of oak tree. That is the speed I would like to move at when it comes to things that matter to me. That is the speed that has been denied to me by my illness, and the sprinting I will need to do once it’s over.

Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe there never is enough time, really, even when you have lots of it. When my wife and I were younger we spent a lot of time apart: four years at different colleges, a year in completely different countries after college, months of distance as I hiked or she worked in different states. Our last night together before these long breaks always snuck up on me and made me feel like a condemned man, even when the condemnation was of our own choosing. We picked those colleges, those adventures, those jobs. Of course knowing that never made tearing the Band-Aid off any easier.

We chose this, too: chose to uproot a life that we’ve spent nearly a decade making, in search of something else. We’ll have to learn what kind of people we are outside of this city and these people, and that does excite me, intimidating as it is. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t this pit in my stomach I can’t get rid of, one that grows as I sit here pissing away my last days here in our tiny downstairs office waiting to be healthy again. I’m not foolish enough to think you can ever leave someplace forever without regrets but I would like to leave with fewer of them than I’m currently on pace for, you know? Maybe that’s the lesson, too. You can’t both choose to go and walk away with a tidy bow on everything. You can stay forever and wonder what else might have been, or you can go and leave more undone than you’d have liked to. Shit, man: I hate personal growth sometimes.

I know I have shared this poem by Molly Brodak before but I’m going to run it back, at least the last few lines, because I don’t know that anyone has ever expressed it better.

This is love.  
It is a mass of ice 
melting. I can't hold  
it and I have nowhere  
to put it down. 

There is so much left to do and say in these next few weeks. So many quiet gentle hours I would like to spend with the people and places I love, hours that seem less probable by the day. I will have to make my peace with all that, and maybe writing it down here is a way to start exorcising all that anxiety about time running out. I suppose it always is and has been, even when we don’t feel it, and there is comfort in giving oneself up to things beyond one’s control.

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

-Chuck

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