Sunday's Snapshots

Recently, I read two opposing books on time. One told me time is a construct and I can therefore make more of it by focusing on what I want to accomplish. Another book said time is finite, I can never have more of it, but I can learn to use it better by focusing on what I want to accomplish. While both books had opposite views of time itself, both books believed time is a thing we can harness through focus. It’s a fascinating contrast, to come at something from two opposed ways and yet obtain the same result. Perhaps that’s why core math works, even if it’s unrecognizable to the math I learned growing up, the math I struggle to use as an adult.

My husband and I entreat our children to be kind to one another, a constant battle. We drop multiple statements about kindness and weaving kindness into every day and don’t realize how often we are unkind to ourselves. My husband and I constantly berate ourselves for the thing forgotten or the weakness perceived, the need for more sleep or rest - rest being the hardest thing to allow ourselves without recrimination. My husband and I approach kindness as a foregone conclusion, like times’ malleability based on focus, while ignoring the battle we’ve created around it, the very opposition of kindness.

Annie’s editorial last week entreated us to remember the good, to focus, like children on an elusive eclipse, on all our good moments. This idea that the good is what carries us through every difficult Monday and not just every difficult September 11, good carries us through daily.

My best friend’s grandmother always said, “the problem with life is, it’s so daily.” While I can’t say exactly what she meant in those moments, the quote has come to mean many things in my life, from a complaint about the day-to-day to an entreaty to be present. It isn’t really a problem that life is so daily, so much as it’s a fact. Life is daily, the good, the bad, the boring. Maybe it’s not that we’re supposed to suck it up and get it done, so much as we’re supposed to be present for all of it, and that can be daunting, exhausting, and, perhaps, the true measure of living.

Maybe we’re not so much supposed to focus or not focus on the good or the bad, as we’re supposed to focus on the mundane. There’s this idea of the holy mundane, (the separation between the holy and the mundane is fascinating too of course, but I’m more interested in looking at them together), this idea that there is no separation: that the mundane is sacred. That the problem of life being so daily, isn’t a problem at all if we’re focusing on the right things.

Washing dishes. Doing laundry. Brushing teeth. There’s this idea that the things we do every day, the things we all ignore or take for granted as the essential but time-sucking necessities of life are imbued with their own sort of magic. That, maybe, the things we do every day in a sort of routinely annoyed huff, are the very things that make us both the most human and the most sacred.

Maybe that’s what the books about being in control of our time really mean: you can feel you’ve lived a lifetime in every moment, good or bad. I can’t focus my way into a 26-hour day, and I can’t harness time to make a difficult day pass in 22. I can, however, focus on the moment I’m in, I can make that moment last well past it’s happening by concentrating on its feeling, or I can allow that moment to end by focusing on the moment I’m in now, letting that other moment’s feeling go.

I can’t magically make my kids be kind to one another in the 24 hours they’re given every day, but I can help us all focus on the moments we are kind to one another, the moments we are present with ourselves and each other. I can focus on our connection to one another amidst the mundane and stop judging the moments themselves. The moments aren’t good or bad, we aren’t being kind or unkind. We are connected in the entirety of our 24 hours, and it is up to us to focus on the moments we want to last, to make the time appear to be under our control.

We construct our days not by borrowing time from one moment to the next or by bringing the emotion of the moment past the moment it occurred. We construct our days by being present for all of it without judgment.

Sunday Dutro is an internationally published writer living in Thompson Falls with her beautiful family. Reach her at [email protected] or sundaydutro.com.