Time. There is never enough of it, and often too much. There are all sorts of stripes and shades of it. Time that is beautifully wasted discussing soccer teams and foreign films over plates of cake and cups of coffee at the table of a sidewalk café in Paris or Brugge is a very different variety of time than, say, minutes or hours spent in a medical waiting room, waiting for news. Very different too, I would imagine, from the moments that might pass by after the whoop of an air raid siren, or waiting for a newborn child to take her first breath. The measurable increments may be the same, but the psychological experience is world’s apart.
My whole life, I have been trying to trap little pieces of it between the pages of books, or beneath the surfaces of photographs, or ferreted away in cubby holes of memory. Adventures and embraces. The sound of someone’s laughter, or a feeling flitting by. There are stretches of past time that are like lost continents waiting to be rediscovered and explored.
When I was nineteen, I thought I had lost everything that would ever matter to me in the world. I had (or so it felt) no family, no job, no friends, and no future. So, because I didn’t know what else to do, I spent every dollar I had to buy a night skiing season pass to Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain. Each night for several weeks I would ski part way down the run known as the cut and sit myself off to the side to smoke a joint and see the lights of the city spread out like a carpet of diamonds beneath me. The rest of the time, my life felt like shit. But those two or three hours each night kept me sane. They were as heavy and precious to me as gold, and as bright as the night-lit city below. There are times when time is a sanctuary that can save your life.
You only live once, and life is too short. Or so we’re always told. So, how should we use our time? How shall we spend this precious currency, the little of it that we have?
Well, I don’t think we should throw it away on grudges or fear. But I do think we should spend it like drunken sailors on a shore leave. I think we should waste it at the beach, say, or riding a roller coaster. I think we should read books of eighteenth-century poetry or long scholarly articles about Lady Gaga or Tuscan cuisine, lymph cancer or Caravaggio. We should take cooking classes and practice making perfect omelettes. Learn the Foxtrot. Hit the disco. Dedicate ourselves to becoming the world’s greatest kissers, or else renowned experts on tree frog venom. Pack our roller bags and head to Tahiti. We should photograph volcanoes. Practice snake charming, build a model death star. We may have a hundred years, or maybe only moments. Either way, the perfect amount of time to do everything that we need.
Like cheap pizza or Salvador Dalis’s iconic paintings of soft clocks, time melts and droops in unexpected ways. Sometimes it freezes and sometimes it flashes; sometimes lingers and sometimes vanishes. There is never enough of it, but being afraid to waste it would be the biggest waste of all.
