Two Wise Men

what if I do have enough time?

It has been another turbulent week in the moving process. Life keeps going on being life, and throwing things at us while we try to pack. I have been trying to figure out how to work with this. I’ve realized, again, that all my models for how things will go are fatally flawed, because they assume a level of order that isn’t in keeping with what actually happens. The easy conclusion is that planning and control are both impossible, and I should give up. This is so appealing that I keep trying it, and I keep finding it wildly unsatisfying after a minute and a half.

The next alternative that occurs to me is that if I try hard enough, enough things will bend themselves to my will that I will have enough control to get by on. Or its cousin, which is that if I level up my skills enough, my acts of control will go farther, and again be, somehow, enough. (Enough for what? I guess enough for satisfaction, enough for reaching the end of the day and feeling like, Okay, that was good, I did well, or I did well enough, I can try this again tomorrow.) This one takes longer to fail, but after a few hours or a few days, it leads to burnout. At which point I am again tempted to give up.

Control, I think, must be the wrong question.

moving makes me aware of all the projects I have started, or meant to start, and have not finished. for example: I meant to do a long series of drawings, one every day, of the giant leaf maple’s buds as they open.

Simone Weil, I am dimly aware, would say that control is maybe the right question, but that its answer is a tiny answer: I control nearly nothing. Not the world, not other people, not my environment, not even most of my own actions. There is one minuscule flash of freedom in my life, one place where the word “choice” is meaningful. It is the moment in which I choose either to live in my self-serving fantasies about the world (the mental and emotional models in which I, always, am at the center) or—not. It is that simple, and also that strangely undefined. The “not” option is the path of what she calls “attention.” It is the ongoing, always-failure-riddled attempt to lean toward things and people as they are, not as I told myself they were, not as I wanted them or needed them to be, not in fact with any reference to me, just as they are. It is a kind of bone-deep acceptance of one’s existence, in the world but not at its center, that shapes a whole attitude toward life.

I think she is right, but I am too tired, this week, to take that premise and spin it out into any kind of plan for handling my life during this move.

In my tiredness, two memories keep trailing me like friendly puppies. I think they are trying to help.

Here’s the first one. Once, in a theology class led by a Ph.D. student teacher named Bo, we discussed time. I answered a question of his by saying that we don’t have enough time. Bo nodded, and then said, “It is true that we are tempted to think we do not have enough time.” He said this gently, without condescension. And I knew immediately that he was right: the God we were talking about would never make humans and then refuse them something so basic as enough time. If I believed what I said I did, my working premise must be that I do have enough time. But it didn’t feel like it then, when I was a single graduate student; and it doesn’t feel like it now, when I am a mother and wife in the middle of a cross-country move.

every year I have meant to do it, as soon as I look out the window for the first time and see the sunlight caught on one of the buds, and on one of the other things that grow next to the buds, which open up not into leaves, but into trailing clusters of tiny green flowers that cover our whole house and yard in a coat of pollen.

Another time, on a bus ride to a conference, I sat next to Gary, the pastoral intern for my church. He was a little older than I was, but a lot farther along in life stages: he was married with a toddler. His life had taken an early turn that knocked his expectations for his future way off-kilter. “I used to think,” Gary said, “that God had big things planned for me. Now I just try to be useful.”

Gary, like Bo, said this gently and with no edge in his voice; it was not a statement of resignation but rather of simplicity. I had the same flash of discomfort and recognition: Some part of me still thought God had big things planned for me. In what Gary said, and in the way he said it, without any defensiveness, I saw a way of living that was whole and quiet and good. And in my vague, secret ambitions, I saw something brittle and arrogant, something that was likely to break into sharp pieces that would hurt me and those around me. A big part of me wanted what he had. And another part of me did not.

at least one year I actually did it for more than one day in a row. three days, maybe.

I have thought often of both these moments since then, and usually I have come away with a sense of having been given a test and failed. I feel like the rich young ruler who’s come to Jesus and been asked to surrender his riches and follow, and I’ve gone away sad. Or I am the inexplicable person in a revisionist parable who finds the pearl of great price in the ground on a lot for sale, but instead of going home and selling everything I have to buy the lot, because the pearl is obviously so much more valuable than anything I own, I have gone away ambivalent, and left the pearl. I feel like I’ve been shown things that ought to make my choices a no-brainer. And yet, somehow, they haven’t.

this year I managed two, but the drawing from the day before this did not turn out looking at all like maple buds or maple branches or like a tree.

Several decades later, having taken a few more knocks of my own, I am less entitled and arrogant than I once was, and a little more realistic about my time. But that is not saying a lot.

Most of the time, I’m still living as though there is a big plan waiting to spring itself on me, as though I’m not actually going to need to make sense of this life as it is right now.

And though it is now obvious to me that I make my worst mistakes when I hurry, and I hurry when I live as though I don’t have enough time, I still hurry through huge stretches of every day.

Earlier I concluded that asking whether I have control or not, and how much, is the wrong question. What if Bo and Gary’s words were not a test to be passed or failed, but rather some better questions?

What would it look like to live as though I did—do—have enough time?

What does my version of “just trying to be useful” look like?

My two wise men were offering me an invitation that does not expire. Simone Weil would say that the big moment of choice is not how to relate to time or ambition. The first, fundamental choice is whether I will listen to the invitation. Whether I will start listening to it now, and keep listening to it, and keep learning one step at a time what it means for me, right where I am now, to say yes.