These Days Pass Me By

Ten years go by in a long hurry. . . I wish I could go back and relive this week in December a decade ago, knowing at least some of what I know now. Knowing what I knew up until September this year. It would be almost enough to make me hold on to those moments that I can't remember. Quite enough, really, though my Switchfoot knowledge would be much poorer. I think the urgency would be present, since I would know that our friendship would disappear in a very short time. 

Maybe I would have remembered to take photos at least once in those eight-ish days. Maybe I would have asked better questions about that girl you liked. Maybe I would have been present a little more. Maybe I would have listened differently, deeply, intently. Maybe I would have made sure I hugged you every day. Maybe I would have driven us to the park to wander in the woods. Maybe we would have read more together. Maybe I would have understood a little better all of those pauses when you were answering questions. Maybe I would remember if we went to Christmas Eve service with my grandma (and I would have hugged her extra, too).

But I can't go back ten years. 

"But. . ." That word is often the volta, the hope in a dark plot. This time it isn't. It is the thud back to earth after soaring on wishes soap-bubble-thin and as transparent.
Th[o]se days pass[ed] me by I dream with open eyes Nightmares haunt my days Visions blur my nights I'm so confused What's true or false What's fact or fiction after all

Is it Christmas time? I can't tell. Am I happy (a yuppy word, I know) since I'm not wasting my eyes with grief? Or have I just been too steadily busy to know the sorrow that leaks out through my eyes so often? Recently I told my nephew that the only dreams I remember when I wake up are the ones that scare me to tears. The nightmares where someone I care about dies. But I don't dream about you. I wake up to find that I'm living the nightmare. I can't reach you. Can't even find you. I can't remember chunks of time I spent with you. Days upon days at Semester. Even days you were at my house. Why can't I remember?!

I want you to be here. I want to hear you telling me: But you haven't lost me yet. . . I'll sing until my heart caves in No, you haven't lost me yet

I feel like I'm someone else when I am at my parents' home. I feel distant from my self. I feel mixed up, like a dependent early-twenty-something mixed together with an independent and interdependent thirty-something. It's hard to process my own thoughts, to separate my thoughts from the here and now of my family. Maybe that's good. But maybe I'm just putting my real thoughts and self on hold until I get home. But when I'm home I miss my family. Is it simply impossible to be fully present, fully myself, and fully appreciative of those I love in the very moment of being together? Is that why I can't remember large portions of times that I spent with you? Was it just too normal, too every day, that I forgot to pay attention? Did I forget that it mattered—all the life we lived together?

Life is short; I wanna live it well One life, one story to tell Life is short; I wanna live it well And You're the one I'm living for Awaken all my soul Every breath that you take is a miracle Life is short; I wanna live it well, yeah

That miracle-breath I take for granted (until I can't suck another in and I choke on fear), it is sweet. Life is short, I wanna live it well. And here is how:

Instructions for living a life: 
Pay attention. 
Be astonished. 
Tell about it.
—Mary Oliver

So I'm telling. . . That the sunset over the farm fields was crimson-orange tonight. That wiggly kiddos with high-pitched squeals might annoy you while you're trying to do something...but you'd give anything to keep them little and trusting and putting their cheek up against yours. That slow-to-speak, blond-haired, elven-friends don't grow on trees—pay attention, visit them, listen, be astonished.

_______

"Yet" Written By Tim Foreman & Jon Foreman
"Live it Well" Written By Tim Foreman & Jon Foreman

The Blur in the Brushstrokes

Particulars matter. Of course, so do Universals and Forms. I hold to a healthy mix of Aristotle and Plato, tempered by Jesus and His word. I find it interesting that the particulars make up the whole, even if the universal was set into place first. For example, God said, Let there be light, and there was; then He went on to make the sun, moon, and stars. The universal preceded the particulars.

However, we live inside the universe—that is, within the universals. We live inside one planet in our solar system, which is in our galaxy, inside the whole universe.  We live within time—second by second, the future becoming now, becoming the past—in such a rapid succession that it is a good thing we don't constantly focus on how fleeting the present is as it arrives. We would miss it if we did. We live inside the seconds, minutes, and hours that make up our days. We live inside the days and months that form the years. We live inside this framework of time, within our rolling universe.

All this I realised in a few moments when writing the date on the upper right corner of my journal, the place and time of day in the upper left. Upon studying abroad, I learned that most of the world writes the date in ascending order: day, month, year. This seemed logical and more practical to my understanding, and I quickly adopted the practise. In fact, North America (and parts of Canada) seems to be the only place(s) where dates are written in a mid-form of month, day, year.

When did this odd practise begin? Though I gave this question a bit more than a cursory search, I could not find a definitive answer. However, I was stunned as I realised that writing the date month-first deconstructs our very selves, as well as the universal framework in which we live. You see, if we begin, not with the overarching framework of the year of our Lord, nor the particular minutes or days that make up our part in that story, what do we have left? An arbitrary median that shows us neither the details nor the whole picture. It is like looking at an impressionist painting at a middling distance—it is merely blurry, causing one to miss the intricate strokes and colours of the up-close detail, as well as the clearer picture from a farther vantage point.

Our minutes and hours are how we spend our days, and as Annie Dillard says: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing."1 If we live only in the minutes, in the what we are doing, without the framework of the universal 'year of our Lord' or the metanarrative of all of history, then what we are doing becomes those unintelligible brushstrokes of a Monet, seen an inch from the canvas. Our moments in the story are unintelligible without a larger framework.

However, there is a big picture laid out from the beginning of time, from the conception of the universe. When we find ourselves placed inside of that framework, then our moments and days—how we spend our lives—flow in the picture. Our days are the light and shadow of a section of the painting. The stroke of our lives may seem incredibly small compared to the giant canvas, but our placement matters in the whole.

Is there room for something between the particulars and the universal? Like months slipped between days and years? Yes, of course. There is something between individual atoms and the galaxy: planets and stars; water and plants; animals, man, and more. So, too, there are individual humans as particulars, society as a whole. What comes between? I posit two middle-forms: the family and the Church.

Families are made up of individuals, helping one another both to survive and to thrive; society is made up of families composed of individuals. The Church (throughout time and space) is made up of individuals and families being knit together into the Body of Christ Jesus. It is these blurry middle-forms where we sometimes have a hard time seeing either the whole story or the individual words.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

      full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.2

You know the individual words, you begin to see the whole story by the stringing and weaving of those words together into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The middle-form of a story is a chapter—often the length of the story that we read in one sitting—if we are savouring the book. A chapter is a good length of the story to read, to mull over, to build upon. But a chapter alone does a poor job of conveying the story as a whole with its plot and chronology; nor does a chapter catch the depth of the characters, their memories, histories, or significance to the whole. A chapter is a necessary middle-form or larger building block—much like a month—obviously somewhere between the details and the whole.

So, we return to families, the building blocks of society. There is really no such thing as an individual family—there are always extended relatives, family members marrying and branching out again and again. It is easy to see why we use the image of a tree to explain families, because there is that continual growth and branching, like a tree, that make up a whole. A family is a bit elastic, expanding in marriages and births, constricting in deaths. It is fluid, and thus a bit blurry; like a swift stream, like the Monet seen somewhere between brushstrokes and long-distance clarity. The present is the same, the blur between the future and history. The middle-form is always the blur, the brushstroke, the action point, the beam swinging from the crane in the building process. It is like present circumstances, rather hard to understand as you are going through them, but easier to see the edges, the whys and wherefores, after you have made it beyond, gaining perspective from the passage of time.

We live in the moments and the days—the particulars. Particulars build those middle-forms of family and Church, of months and years, of planets and stars; all within the frame of the whole picture, God’s universal story. The moments matter—become material—like paint on the canvas or inky words on a page. The middle-forms matter, too—setting lonely people into their right place; ordering words and paragraphs; building brick upon brick—so that we can see the family, or story, or home. We see the whole by the blurs in concert, the fragmented pieces coming together.

Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

So the little moments,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of Eternity.3

_________

1. Dillard, Annie The Writing Life (New York, New York, Harper Collins, 2009), emphasis mine

2. Oliver, Mary, "Breakage" in Why I Wake Early (Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2004), 32
3. Carney, Julia Abigail Fletcher, "Little Things" Public Domain