Time
I’ve just come from a live interview with Paul Kingsnorth, a prophetic voice in our time. Among other small topics (modernity, the West, artificial intelligency, God) Paul addressed the nature of limits. We are not infinite, despite what the technoutopians would have us believe. Limits ground us in our humanity and give us a healthy sense of our place in a larger universe, rather than believing the oldest and most persistant lie that we can transcend our limitations. God is God and we are not, and that’s a really good thing.
I was reminded of a Wendell Berry essay I read several years ago about the virtue of cultivating a specific piece of land. This is the lesson of limits in a nutshell: no matter who we are, we all have a certain domain - jobs, families, houses, friendships, pets, plants - and the particularlity of those relationships confers a unique responsibility to care for them. So simple in principle, and yet so hard to practice. We are constantly pulled away from our responsibilities by believing that we can do more and have more and be more . We eventually find ourselves exhausted by the pursuit of more, and long to do and have and be enough.
It’s no accident that Wendell Berry was a farmer and Paul Kingsnorth is a homesteader. Nature presents us with visible, tangible limits and regular opportunities to work with and abide within those limits. I think that’s a big part of the reason I find myself drawn to nature, because it helps me reorient myself to the bigger reality of God’s creation and my part in it. Still, when you’re going at the speed of moderntity, it can be hard to slow down and accept that. This story is a meditation on the struggle to be an embodied creature in time and space, and the surprising joy and wonder that may be found when we learn to live within the time that is given to us.
I can still feel the length and heighth and breadth of the sky in front of my apartment where the sun would be rising any minute. The massive space in front of my apartment was a theater, the hazy sky a curtain which would part any minute to reveal the star of the show. Birds wheeled past my porch like a circus act to keep the impatient audience entertained. But the sun still did not rise.
I had been awake since 2:00 in the morning. Five days of five-hour nights had done nothing to mitigate my jet lag. I was halfway around the world on a business trip, sleeping in a strange room in a strange city in a strange land. I watched random YouTube videos to pass the restless hours.
It had taken me ten years to get here. When I started my journey into engineering, I imagined this career taking me to far-flung corners of the world to solve pressing environmental problems. I worked doggedly toward that vision, putting myself through four years of school and three interships to get two degrees and one “dream” job. That job had propelled me through another six years of challenging projects, and I had the skills and scars to show for it. Now I stood at the pinnacle of the particular mountain I had been climbing, and the only place I wanted to be was at home with my wife.
By 4:00 I had given up all hope of falling back asleep, and I dragged myself out of bed to go for a walk. The complex of high-rises was eerily silent. The sky was black but the grounds were lit up like a ghostly carnival. The paths veered in and out of copses of trees, past electric-blue reflecting pools, up ramps that spiraled weightlessly into the darkness. I drifted along, dream-like. My steps made no sound; my presence was totally unobserved. The void of space and time swallowed everything and me with it.
I had spent ten years learning how to master time, and now I found myself mastered by it. I had been driven by restlessness, and now I didn’t know how to rest. I wanted to be somewhere else, but time held me captive and demanded my full attention. What was it that I was meant to be seeing?
By 6:00 I was working my way through a strong coffee on the porch and the first hint of daylight was growing on the horizon. I heard the birds before I saw them. Then one by one they appeared against the gray sky, swiftly turning and diving in pure surrender to space. I tried to take a video but they were too fast and too far away for my camera, but in my minds’ eye I was soaring with them.
As the light grew, the land opened up in front of me: the gardens and pools at the foot of my high-rise, the golf course beyond that, and an expanse of trees beyond that disapparing over a ridge in the distance. An orange glow had started to color the sky just above the ridge. I watched and waited. More birds, more bird song, more exuberant flying on wind gusting in from the east. The world was waking up, but still the sun did not rise.
And in the next moment it was there, a crescent of gold in the midst of the gray haze. With every passing second the gold crescent grew and brightened, rising visibly before me. After a minute it was a perfectly round, orange orb, like a full moon on fire, and I could look directly at it with open eyes. Now, the time that I had willed to speed up I wished would slow down so I could stay in that moment and gaze at the new sun in all its glory.
But soon it was too bright to look at directly, and I shielded my eyes against the brightness of the day. The new day meant that the night was over, and work would soon begin. Time had carried me inexorably to this moment, to this work. I was here for a reason, and I only had one decision to make. I left the porch and started to get ready.