Last month we marked mid-winter’s day. My oldest daughter was telling me about what season she loved the most when I realized that she is growing up with a very different conception of time than what I experienced at her age.
When I was a child, time was structured by school. The “school year” was the year. It started in the September, took a brief break at Christmas time, slogged on through the months until another, shorter, break in April and then marched on doggedly until “the year” was over in mid-June. This was followed by a slow-moving, formless time called “summer break” and then, come September, you moved up a grade and the whole thing started again. It sounds like a cycle, but it was driven by forward movement, not cyclical. Always moving forward on the conveyor belt of school and the artificial milestones school established. From elementary to middle, middle school to high, always marching toward “graduation.” Even after graduation, the forward march continued. High school moved on to college. In my case, first community college and then university. A Bachelor’s Degree marched onward to a Master’s Degree. And then the testing to earn my certifications , to prove my learning, began. Always moving in one direction - forward.
The school year was almost completely divorced from the natural world. A century ago, the seasons would have dictated when children from agricultural families attended school - if a school was even available in their community. The planting season in spring and the harvest in the fall both would have necessitated all hands in the fields. The growing season of summer and the hibernation of winter would have been time for book learning. I remember in high school the talk turned toward year-long schooling to prevent “the summer slide.” Nothing sounded worse to my school-averse ears.
Into adulthood and the forward march was still going, but now there was a shift. I was 31 years old, and settling in to my third year of public accounting, when the trees outside my corner cubicle caught my eye. I look back at those trees now as the first ambassadors of the natural world who were successful at catching my attention. I worked on the 9th floor and had a windowed cubicle in the south-western corner of the building. Below me and across the street was a line of five urban trees. It was late August, and I’d been working almost non-stop for over a year. Sure a few extra days off around Christmas, maybe a long weekend for my anniversary, but no real vacations. I had been too well-trained by the conveyor belt of my youth. There was always more work to be done, so nose to the grindstone!
But the trees, despite being planted in the sidewalk and surrounded by high-rises, still kept tune with the real seasons. And summer, the only season that offered an allowable reprieve from the constant drumbeat of “productivity” was quickly waning. The trees each had a swath of crimson mixed in with the summer green. The first hint of autumn color, a clear sign that cooler temps and “back to school” season was just around the corner, shocked me. How could fall be so close when I hadn’t even had time for a summer break? For a well trained student like myself, summer was the only acceptable time to take a vacation, but I’d unwittingly fallen in to a profession whose busy season stretched from early February well into the start of fall.
Those trees hinted that another conception of time lay underneath the one I was operating within. They were my first indication of time passing in a way different from the way I’d been raised. I stayed with that job for another year until I became pregnant with my first child. And then with her birth, all my preconceived notions of time were shattered. Time was no longer linear.
The birth of a first child can challenge your perception of time like no other. Those first few weeks disappear in a blur. There’s no longer a night of sleep followed by a day of work. The work of learning to care for a newborn is constant, the sleep caught in fragments far smaller than desired. Time is measured in the fullness of an unnursed breast, the lankness of unwashed hair, the fatigue that settles into your bones while you figure out this new landscape. You acclimate to this new world, but you learn that it doesn’t operate under the same assumptions as the old one. The child newly born to this world possesses a wildness that most adults have lost. They haven’t joined the world of linear time, their time is cyclical. And it continues for years.
And then school looms on the horizon. When it was “time” for our first-born to go to school I reacted viscerally. We had attended the kindergarten registration night at our neighborhood school. I had not enjoyed school as a child, and suddenly I was faced with having to go through the system all over again but this time as the parent, the enforcer, the one who would mold my child to the demands of the school system. I couldn’t do it. And yet we did do it, for a while, because the cultural forces that push you toward school are strong. But when we pulled out of the school system and made the leap into the unknown world of self directed education, time settled back into the cyclical rhythms it had held since her birth. Only this time I was starting to see them.
Our cycles started small: Monday was for laundry and grocery shopping, Wednesday for storytime, Fridays for playdates. (Ma Ingals would be proud.) But our cycles expanded as my children grew. Holidays and birthdays marked our movement through the year. And then with the holidays, the seasons made themselves known. Long summer nights, early winter darkness. The rains that came with the fall and the first crocuses of spring. These cyclical waypoints took on larger importance as the joy of celebrating lit up my children’s eyes and the realization that they came over and over. As one Halloween passed, the girls would start to dream up the next year’s costumes. As one birthday party ended, they would start planning the next one. But also as one disappointingly cool and wet summer passed, they knew that as the year moved on and the cycle turned, we’d return to summer again. As one snowy winter gave way to a warm, rainy winter, they knew that winter would come again. They are living in a world of cyclical time.
There’s something beautiful that happens when we return to the same space over and over. When we return to a physical space to observe and witness, over time we become part of the landscape. The practice of a sit-spot allows us to spend enough time in one place to become aware of all the large and small activity contained in that space. Birds that nest, small animals that burrow, the human who always walks her dog on the same route and at the same time. When we return to the same space over and over we learn to see more.
The same thing happens as we return to the same time over and over. My perception of time was shaped by what Thomas Berry calls “millennial fulfillment.” Berry writes that time “shifted from the seasonal rhythms of the universe…to a shaping of the time process toward some ultimate fulfillment within the historical order.” My time was an arrow shot from a quiver that only moved in one direction until it reached its final target. I was always moving forward. My children however, have grown up with a temporal version of a sit spot. Spring follows winter follows fall follows summer. They are aware that they will get the chance to revisit each season. To experience it again and again. Each renewal of the seasons is a sort of rebirth, a chance to try again, to see more deeply, to connect more fully with the lessons present.
I am incredibly thankful that I’ve awakened to this older conception of time. It is slower, it is deeper, and for my family it is ultimately more rewarding. The modern vision of time hangs heavy over Western culture and it takes consistent effort to live with a cyclical mindset. But the benefits are there. If only we take the time to see them.