HOW DO WE MEASURE A LIFE?

Last month, I had a week alone while my husband visited family in Montana, a gift of time that allowed some of the fracturing and tension to drain away. The dog, who had been very ill, got some good medications and rallied while my husband was gone.

I did all sorts of little chores, stuff you put off endlessly: washing the kitchen cabinets, touch-up painting, and the like. Those kinds of chores allow the mind to wander, and I started to think again about time.

When I was young, I “invented” a little timesaving mantra: do it while you’re over there. In other words, instead of crisscrossing the bedroom numerous times as I thought of tasks, I started to bundle them—all the bed-related tasks at once, then all the desk-related tasks, etc. Time and motion studies had somehow embedded themselves in my juvenile brain.

I still seem to measure time in terms of tasks accomplished: gardens weeded, laundry folded, classes prepared. It’s not a very effective measure of a life. A shelf of print publications isn’t a bad measure, but there’s also time spent with family and friends; or, for my old boss at Bartlett Tree Experts, the measure was time spent on his boat. Maybe it’s building a successful literary press or winning awards. Maybe the measure of a life, as a lawyer friend of ours once joked, is a stack of paper. In American culture, it’s stuff: the new car, beautiful house, latest iPhone.

When my husband returned from his trip, the dog swiftly degenerated, unable to walk a mere day later, unable to stand three days later. On the 18^th, we put him to sleep. How do we measure the value of his life or our time with him? I don’t claim any knowledge of animal interiority, but he waited for my husband to come home, curled up against the front door. He knew the daily routine, bringing us the frisbee around 3 pm to go out and play. He always wanted to be where we were. Through him, we knew affection, if not love, as well as loyalty, enthusiasm, joy. While his life is measured in years, it’s also measured in presence: a constant awareness that there is another living being in the house, a being that knows and needs you, and that you know and need. 

I recently read The Outermost House by Henry Beston. It’s the record of a year lived on the Eastham dunes on Cape Cod. He arrived in September at his cottage and found the natural world so entrancing he could not bring himself to leave. He spent that year recording the seasons, the wildlife, insects, shifting dunes, light, storms—all that impacted or inhabited that stretch of sand. He writes:

“...I chanced to look up a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high and travelling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow’s from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean—their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals” (37).  

It’s a world now gone, even the house, which was swept away in a storm in 1978.

(National Seashore Park, Eastham, Mass.)

Beston allowed his curiosity and love to shape his time. He had a productive goal, but it wasn’t to impose his will on time, to extract a certain number of tasks or observations from the time he had. Instead, he let himself be open to what was offered. Over and over, he comes back to the idea of reverence:

“By day, space is one with the earth and with man—it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars, pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience” (174).

That openness and reverence are what I’m trying to embrace if I can just slow down. Time doesn’t get used, it merely passes. Whether I am present in it or wrapped up in how much I’ve accomplished makes a difference in how I experience it. Besides, doing more doesn’t mean more value. In fact, it might mean less, if we miss the chance to observe the robin in the birdbath or see the light sifting through the trees or watch the dog dream in his sunny spot.

What’s your approach to time? Does it change in the summer? For those of you who have retired or who work for yourselves, how does your measurement of time match (or not) the dominant culture’s? I always love hearing from you. Thanks for reading.

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