How to Mark Time
M and Q, our son and daughter, spent the two-week Christmas/New Year’s break perfecting their lethargy. They stretched out in their rooms, streamed music and movies, chatted through apps, and even read books until they emerged bored with being bored. My wife and I dedicated vacation days to much of the time, too, and we soon followed our kids all the way off fixed schedules. Up late at night, up late in the morning, eating how and when we wanted, which turned out to be poorly and often. We didn’t start some days until the afternoon, and we somehow didn’t feel like we shouldn’t have.
We were freer people by the time our 2017 schedules arrived. People without alarms. People with nowhere to be. We liked these people. We didn’t want to trade them for the new year.
It wasn’t always this way. M happily returned to school after his first New Year’s break ever. Q, then nearly three, insisted that we bring her backpack too. We didn’t think much about it; Q liked to mirror her big brother, accompanying him to drop off with a backpack of her own necessities — a blanket and Purple Rabbit (the stuffed animal then in heavy rotation). At M’s classroom door, Q took off her coat, calmly handed it to my wife, and started after her brother into class. When my wife pulled her out, Q was confused. “You said I get to go to school next year,” she said. “Isn’t it next year now?”
Q was — and is — particularly difficult to argue with, especially when she has a point. The year had officially turned over, and we did promise she could go to school “next year.” We had a tough time convincing her that the new year and new school year don’t align, that she needed to wait just a bit longer to enter a classroom of her own. She did start that following September, turned five, then 7, then somehow eleven. Q still has that blanket, but her backpack now holds a laptop, a MetroCard for the train to school, ideas to work on in English and Spanish, a Harry Potter pencil case she made herself. M has worn through several backpacks and is now rubbing up against high school. And when we walk with them each morning to the train and to our obligations, it’s hard not to notice that M stands a head taller than his mother and that Q can nearly look her in the eye.
Somewhere along the way, the years figured out how to pass on their own. A feeling began to run through the house each December that the year to come will be much like the last, that we are going back to things instead of on to something new. Our current projects (adolescence, adulthood) don't have frequent milestones, and, as Q eventually acknowledged, a new year and a new you don’t line up like they used to. Why rush back to something that will wait for you?
It's hard not to feel rushed. Verlyn Klinkenborg, in his “Rural Life” series for the New York Times, marked a New Year’s moment like this:
There is something deeply gratifying about joining the horses in their pasture a few minutes before the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year.
It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, just to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate not the passing of time, but the way it has chosen to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. I find myself thinking that one way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning.
I’ve made many resolutions over the years — read more, write more, finally learn my way around the banjo my father gave me — but promises to yourself are never quite broken if you don’t ask yourself whether they’ve been kept. Klinkenbourg continues:
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.
I tend to like January 1 not for the fresh start, but for the day we get to spend together, wherever it falls in the week. Besides, since our kids have been in the house they’ve become the stars we chart by, the determiners of rhythm. For them, my wife and I represent (if anything) something like the “single long strand of being,” the context in which school and time off from school and birthdays and far-off family and nearly everything else can’t come quickly or slowly enough for M and Q. We embody an age that they still can’t quite grasp, which means we remind them that some things take time, as they probably should.
Still, I think he’s right that with minds designed to track, explain, and plan, we can never really stand herded with the horses in the cold pasture of the present. We can’t help but turn passings into passages, can't help but make endings so that we can have beginnings. But our awareness of time makes our relationship with it an uneasy one, too — one moment we have too much even to kill, the next it’s precious, not enough, borrowed, up.
As much as I’ve told myself that I’d abandoned resolutions, this January pulls on me. I’m not sure when it happened, but looking back, I see my thread in the long strand wind far back into a fog. Looking forward, I can make out the knot that ties it up, while the threads of my wife and M and Q continue on thick and strong beyond where I can see. Fear then, I suppose, nothing unusual about that. Fear of missing something. Here I am, then, not out in the pasture but inside at a desk between the calendar and the clock, rummaging around for any new selves that might be left to build.
And here you are too.
How do we mark time? Did I promise to answer the question? In that case, I’ve got some ideas. We never begin marking time at the beginning, so we might as well start now: remembering, thinking hard about some things that matter, putting a note in a book, opening a hand and tracing the lines.
How about we try to make a mark on time. I've put myself on a schedule. Let’s figure out how to talk to ourselves, and let's see what we say.