That Time 2023 Evaporated

“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“It goes faster,” warned my grandmother at Christmas. “Faster and faster.”

I believe her. She’s ninety-one, so she knows a lot about time. 

We’re now firmly in step with the marching pace of 2024, but my mind is still consumed with last year, when, like a punctured lung, time collapsed in on itself with a violent efficiency I would rather not experience again. I fear I won’t break out of the pattern unless I pause to breathe and come back to myself.

This is the pause. Pull up a chair, if you too have experienced the phenomenon of time evaporating from under you.

This is what 2023 felt like to me: A series of doors opening and closing, opening and closing.

The sun comes up, and I open the door to a new day. I do the things I need to do, checking them off the list. It’s afternoon now, and I look up, around, behind, like an overcautious driver trying to change lanes, making it more stressful than it needs to be. Then my chair is suddenly bathed in moonlight. I shake off the day and close the door. Close my eyes. Dream a dream. Wake up and open another door.

Days roll by like this, relentlessly. Do I have bigger intentions for my life? Yes, of course. But bloody time just keeps slipping away. Check, check, check, go the items off my list, but I’m missing something. What is it? I’m more organized than I’ve ever been, so punctual, and so observant – nothing gets past me. And yet. 

Just like that, two weeks are gone. Two weeks! I continue checking items off my list. Writing projects. Sending invoices so I can make my rent, and then beginning in June, my mortgage payment. Because yes, amongst all the busywork of opening and closing imaginary doors, I close the actual door to my rental home for good. And open a new door, to a new house.

At some point at the end of summer, this door situation really gets to me. 

Unfortunately, by now I’m well and truly strapped into this ride. Everything begins to feel very “Groundhog Day”. I check things off my list with a greater ferocity and speed, as if trying to catch up to time. Didn’t we just buy groceries? Didn’t we clean the bathroom recently? But the evidence is right there, laid bare; a yawning pantry and grimy shower. Time has indeed passed me by.

An avalanche of Very Adult Problems comes crashing down in November. You know, the really boring ones your parents complained to their friends about over dinner when you were five years old, as you hung onto your mom’s leg like a desperate flag and begged her to be more interesting.

Well, you were right when you were five years old. 

Plumbing issues, flu, work deadlines. Condo board stuff and another flu, because my body has apparently decided to throw in the towel at the tender age of 34. Groceries, people to call, bills to pay, and a third flu to round it all off, because there are multiple flu strains in this city and I’ve gotten all of them. 

And then it’s over. 2023 is gone. My body – limp and feverish. My mind – floating in the ether. My heart – not feeling much. My soul – old, but not in the complementary “you’re an old soul” way. Just old.

What does it mean to take life seriously?

A question I posed to a friend over breakfast at the beginning of the year. He wrinkled his nose like I had suggested we start the cabbage soup diet together. “Ugh,” he said. The word serious is not really in his vocabulary. I laughed with him, but asked if by “ugh” he meant he doesn’t take life seriously. To his credit, he paused and thought about it.

“I enjoy life seriously,” he finally said, with a twinkle in his eye. “But I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

I had burdened him with my sad 2023 rant just a few minutes before, and he had commiserated with me about the evaporation of time – he had felt it too. In his case, a self-admitted lack of ambition, goals, and discernible path forward was the problem. Time had slid right away while he sat on local patios and waited for more meaningful things to materialize.

I asked him if he thought, based on my pattern of opening and closing doors – the schedules and the lists – that I took life seriously. He squinted at me suspiciously, like it was a trick question. It probably was.

“Well, you’re a serious person,” he said eventually. “You do the things you set out to do. But I don’t know if that’s what it means to take life seriously. Like, to revel in all that life has to offer. That’s what taking life seriously means to me.”

Somewhere in the gulf between us, the twain must meet, I thought at the time.

Does taking life seriously coincide with the passage of time?

I thought about this when discussing time with another friend, P., whose son is almost three years old. “The days are long and the years are short,” he said, shaking his head wistfully. I thought about how his son will turn eighteen eventually, probably sooner than expected, and I’ll be nearly fifty.

I thought about it again a couple of weeks later, when I learned that a woman I had known when I was a teenager had died at forty years old under tragic circumstances. I realized that despite all my efforts in 2023, I had been treating time not seriously, but frivolously, acting as though I had endless amounts of it to sacrifice on the altar busywork and chores and errands, instead of with people I love – laughing, exploring, thinking, and stretching out in the sun for a long summer afternoon.

Finally, I thought about it again while searching my phone for a particular photo to show a colleague. It depicts my husband hanging off our 60-foot roof, which is the only way we can access our dryer duct to clean it. I noticed how many photos I had taken in 2023  – so many great moments that made me laugh and smile as I saw them again. I was there, conceivably, behind the camera. But while those moments were happening, I wasn’t always truly there.

So, maybe I’m being too serious about taking life seriously. 

Maybe the slowing of time doesn’t have to be an impossible magic trick, bending physics for my own personal use… just a change in my own perception. A kaleidoscope moment. Like most transformations, it probably doesn’t have to be a huge production or require a massive overhaul of my life. Maybe it can be (dare I say) easy.

Where I’ve landed is this: A busy career-oriented person and a surfer bum catching waves both take life seriously in their own way. They can equally experience the evaporation and honouring of time. In the end, I suppose, it’s up to us to decide how we experience the passage of time.

Perhaps, between these two opposites, Time can become a friend.

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