This BIG world has made me restless. And rest less.
It is an equation of time divided by 3 children, several arts projects, a neglected domestic sphere, and an inner disposition of associational imagining and distraction. Of continual interruption by my own life.
Lilly and I communicate the planning of issues, the inviting of contributors, and the impossibility of time, all while charting and creating the BIG landscape and its inhabitants. There are thousands of words crossing the country in any one 24hour period. We forage to distil the central ideas while moving at a breakneck speed into places we didn't forecast arrivals for. Accumulating each other, the ideas and too much of all of it in a concentrated game of Pass the Parcel without end.
I have an hour now and immediate panic for what I should attend to. First to land, to arrive. Then to stretch the minutes...so far that I create a space in between the end of one minute and the beginning of the next. And finally to live in that space for a moment, (the one out the window where there are no deadlines and it is compulsory to daydream), and rest in it.
I laugh at the alternating urgency and delaying of time I frolicked in as a child, and watch it now in my own children. Kids have a way of tricking time. Of extending it and compressing it to fit their needs. I marvel at their play when there is no question of time at all. The way they own that space between the minutes in a way we have forgotten.
In a split second, I remember the password to time, and put it in my pocket for later.
Thank you Jo - Time has its own galaxy in our household too, it disappears when you need it, and when you are waiting for something, it slows and stretches.
ReplyDeleteI need to stop telling my children to 'hurry up' because one day when they are all grown up, I will regret those lost minutes.