TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPIN’

Nothing kicks us around harder than time. Mostly because time, or at least keeping track of time, is a human construct. The human psyche craves order so much that we’ve had to categorize all of existence onto a linear, endless (and purely invented) structure that we convince ourselves we are capable of manipulating. We’re always either saving time or wasting time or, hopefully more often than not, enjoying some time well spent. But the truth is we aren’t doing anything to time at all, and instead, much like the crocodile in Peter Pan, time is hunting all of us. Tick tock, tick tock…

Many of us know about “island time,” the sensation that the pace of life slows down once you surround yourself with enough water that just any old person cannot access you at any old time. Up here in the mountains, it feels almost the opposite—as if time were somehow woven into gravity. As if the same invisible forces that pull us down snowy slopes and tug our rivers out to the sea also ensure our time keeps on slippin-slippin-slippin’…

Likely, some of mountain culture’s hardwired draw towards immediacy has evolved from the scarcity of a fresh snowfall on the mountain faces—it won’t last forever (or even an hour sometimes) so go, go, go. As such, the mountains seem to attract more type-A, go-getter hares than slow-and-steady tortoises. “We underestimate what we can do in a day,” my friend Kitt always tells me, “and overestimate what’s possible in a decade.”

So take your time. Which isn’t to say slow down (though that can be good, too), but rather actively take control of your time. Take it and be aware, be patient, be purposeful—how we spend our time is how we spend our lives, and the time poured into our passions is the very thing that makes them important. So book that plane ticket, practice that grab, head out on the multi-day trip you’ve been talking about and chase those storms and create those bonds with the people or places that ignite your mind and heart. Because throughout it all, despite it all, time marches on. And for us, time is terminal.

It’s an inevitable bummer if you dwell on it. So don’t. We can never claw our back up the neverending slope of time, so pick a line, ride it out, and remember what Grand Master Oogway, the great tortoise philosopher, once said: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery. But today is a gift, that’s why it’s called the present.”

words :: Susan Musgrave

Every August 1, give or take 24 hours, the geese return to the bay in front of my house. I know because for the last thirty years I’ve marked this day—a prelude to fall and winter—on my calendar. My calendar confirms what the honking of the geese tells me, but how do the geese know? Is it a new shade of grey in the morning light out on the water, a sound another migrating shorebird makes, the way the harbour seals wriggle their noses into the salt-smelling breeze?

I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve been missing, what pleasures I’ve been in too much of a hurry to appreciate or even notice, by strapping some controlling measure of time onto my wrist and hanging a reminder of the coming month on my wall, X-ing off the days.

Since the industrial age, time has become a measure of our productivity as well as our most valuable commodity. The onslaught of new technology that promised to set us free has instead made us slaves to our cell phones and laptop computers, which instill expectations of instantaneous action. Overall, these machines fuel the trend that every nanosecond must be accounted for; we are quick to condemn those whom we perceive as “wasting their time” and surround ourselves with time-and-labour-saving devices such as my newly acquired food processor that decimates a cabbage in no time at all (and takes the rest of the day to disassemble and clean). If I wish to walk across the road and watch the geese float out to sea, I will likely chastise myself for “getting nothing done” and for squandering my precious time. Yet what could be more precious than living fully in those magic and spontaneous moments that make us happy to be alive?

A friend from Ottawa accused me of having entered her into a time-warp on Vancouver Island (I asked her to take off her raincoat, gumboots and watch when she came to visit me one soggy November), but why is living in harmony with the moon and tides more warped than waking to an alarm and your first thoughts being, “How much time do I have to get up, get dressed, get out the door, drop the kids at daycare and get down to the House of Commons?”

In the daily grind, circa 2024, we’re up 365 going 24/7 in a heavily weighted competition against the clock. Stopping to chat to a neighbour over the fence or slowing down to watch the geese float out to sea will only make you late for your appointment with your time management consultant.

Island time is what Jay Griffiths, author of A Sideways Look at Time, calls wild time. “Just as vast wilderness once surrounded us, so too, time was wild: everlasting, undefined, unenclosed, unnamed, a mystery.” Time, she says, has been seized and colonized in the West; clock time—or tamed time—is a mere construct, arbitrary and artificial, of modern society. Wild time, by contrast, is an openhanded hour, the open-hearted day.

Wild time thrives in nature, and in the spirit of play (western society fears play, which includes sex, drug-taking, rock ‘n’ roll and other intoxicating behaviours, such as art, which is serious play—of a subversive nature) and every child is born exuberantly full of both wild time and play. “Adults were enemies,” Anne Wilkinson wrote in a memoir of her Ontario childhood. “Not bitter enemies (except on occasions) but natural, inevitable ones. Their greatest offence was in regard to time, an abstraction they did not in the least understand.”

Adults, she continued, were always ringing bells or calling time for breakfast, time to come in out of the cold, time for bed. “Whereas we, with a more philosophical concept of the clock, knew that time, in their sense, did not exist. What we happened to be doing was forever.” Whether that was skating on the frozen lake or lying in bed, hibernating, on a winter morning, Wilkinson recalls: “Slowly the enemy won, and thereby robbed us of immortality. Before we knew it our own hands were shaking bells and calling time for dinner, time to go to bed.”

Too soon we are forced to grow up, to live at the mercy of two authoritative taskmasters: the clock and the calendar. In our busy lives nothing happens if we don’t plan it, often months in advance. We work full-time or part-time and wonder where the time goes. We’re not here for a long time, but for a good time, the saying goes—a trendier way of describing how we kill time until time kills us.

But stop for a second: Look back on a near-death experience or an ecstatic night of lovemaking; recall, in terrible or blissful vivid detail, how time stood still. Perhaps we all need to take time to appreciate those moments, those brief glimpses of immortality between birth and death that have nothing to do with the hands on a clock.

Currently living on Haida Gwaii, the author of more than 30 books and once labelled the wild sea-witch of Canada’s northwest coast, Susan Musgrave was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.