Keeping Time

Reflections from the shortest day of the year on repairing our relationship with time, and keeping a different kind of calendar.

I call myself a “time optimist.” It’s just a fancy word for “late,” but “time optimist” sounds nicer. I am someone who thinks moving apartments can be done in one Saturday. Who once tried to walk from one side of Boston to the other in two hours. Who, if she’s running five minutes early, will whip out a pan and start making eggs. I can’t help it. It’s just how I’m built.

If you read my first post, you know that just before moving to San Francisco in 2009, I rolled my car on an icy interstate. “Survived” isn’t the word—I climbed out of the bent steel and shattered glass without a scratch, thanking my angels. Shaken, but fine. I had no health insurance. The school nurse who pulled over to tuck me into her warm car until the state trooper arrived later found my eyeglasses in her passenger seat. She happened to be the mother of a girl who was dating my neighbor’s cousin, so she called her daughter, who called her boyfriend, who called his cousin, and I got my glasses back. You can’t make this shit up. On every level, it was a miracle. 

Here’s a glimpse of the aftermath, from the first draft of my book:

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At first it was just small decisions I made differently. Climb the tree on the side of the road to look at the sky, eat a second helping of cake, jump into the ocean with all my clothes on, get up a little earlier to watch the sun break over the trees. I had almost died, and that meant something. I was twenty-two. Suddenly, living became urgent. 

I moved to California as planned, to the Marin Headlands, a slice of federal land just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where I worked as a naturalist. Outside the door of my little duplex sloped red, crumbling hills made up of once-living organisms, an ancient sea floor of protozoa. Coyotes slid through my backyard at night. San Francisco lay just across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I rolled in and out of it on a bike with neon duct tape stretched across the wheels. Though my earnings put me below the poverty line, for me it all added up to something bigger. I led children on nature hikes by the ocean during the school year and summers guided outdoor expeditions in the American West and across the world. Weekends I steered rafts down the South Fork of the American River. I played ultimate frisbee against some of the best players in the nation and choreographed flashmob dances on street corners for fun. I said yes to everything I could, and like this I held back time. 

But as with any object gathering speed, there’s a point where steering gets harder. There’s a point where you lose control.

“Hurricane Jenny” my loved ones nicknamed me. As soon as my bank account reached a thousand dollars I would buy a plane ticket somewhere new. I had become a person who slept in too many airports, who cried when the sunset was too orange, or when the night janitor in Terminal B whistled a melody so clear and beautiful it roused the sparrows from where they perched on the television monitors. On more than one occasion I crashed my bike looking at the stars, which were one of the few things that centered me. I’d lay there in the road and stare up at Orion with hot tears running into my hair, begging him to show me home. 

I had escaped with my reckless, immortal bubble of youth still intact—a fact I often forgot. But whenever I remembered I was going to die someday, I’d pour myself a glass of wine before noon and drink it with my back against a redwood tree, gazing up into her branches. I’d put my hand on a lover’s chest just to feel their heart beating against my palm. I’d trace my parents’ faces with my eyes, trying to memorize them. I hid urgent notes for strangers in airplane bathroom ashtrays: Hello dear friend, you are so much wilder than you have been told. Every year on my birthday I filled pages with dreams and desires and reminders of who I wanted to be, sealed them in an envelope addressed to myself. 

Student of death that I was, I read lists of peoples’ dying regrets. Some were simple, like the poem perhaps incorrectly attributed to Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges: If I could live again—I will travel light / If I could live again—I’ll try to work bare feet / at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn / I’ll ride more carts / I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children. A palliative care nurse published the top five regrets she’d heard from her patients: “I wish I’d had the courage to live life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” “I wish I had let myself be happier.”

I was determined not to end up with a list. My work outside was showing me an important disconnect. I saw how people deadened themselves, working all day at jobs they didn’t enjoy only to come home and switch on the television. I saw how they hurried, noses in their phones, always behind schedule and oblivious to their surroundings. I saw how they stepped tentatively over the sage-drenched hills as though they didn’t belong. We live in a time of distraction—from ourselves, from each other, from the earth—and I was not immune. But when a whale breached off the coast; when I hooked my finger into the curl of a wild cucumber unfurling her tendrils toward the sun, it was enough to remind me to look up, and remember. Missed the river by this much.

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In some ways, I have always been like this. Growing up with an aging parent means that everyone in your family is always aware of the time you don’t have. I am wired to seek joy, to love hard, to squeeze every drop out of a moment. It makes me an exhausting person to date. 

The point is this: it took me far too long to realize that it wasn’t my packed calendar that made me feel alive—it was the moments in between. Some nights I’d bike up to the cliff above my house where deep, black water swept from underneath the Golden Gate Bridge out to the lighthouse, the Farallons, the impenetrable Pacific. If no park rangers were around I’d hop the barrier, slide down the rocks, and perch on the outermost edge where ocean, city, and stars all came together, the line between worlds suddenly thin, my heartbeat suddenly close. These moments of silence were a shock to my system. I could cup my hands around time and hold on.  

I’ve been searching for those moments ever since.

I want to tell you about a different kind of calendar I started keeping this year. I learned about this calendar at a writing residency in remote Alaska. “Residency” is maybe the wrong word—I was offered the spot because the guy who ran the place asked if I could cook and I said yes. For one month I lived with four other people on the beach of a lake that heaved and cracked with spring ice. I wrote by hand, by candlelight, until the one hour a day when the generator came on and I furiously typed everything I’d written into my laptop. I taught myself how to cook with a kitchenful of veggies, sourdough starter I didn’t know how to use, and one cookbook, and served everybody dinner in the middle of the night because the midnight sun confused me. Grizzly bears sauntered past my window. The only way to get to where we were was a seaplane flown low through the mountains. It was—and probably still is—one of the most stunning places on earth. 

Hanging on the wall of the main lodge was a calendar of important dates and people’s comings and goings, but at the end of each day, someone would fill in what really happened: Saw a badger. Double rainbow. Snow.

This year, I kept a similar kind of calendar on my dresser, its only purpose to record the full and tiny moments that make up a life. Instead of Zoom meetings and doctors appointments and work schedules, good kisses, I wrote. Bioluminescence. Skinnydipping. 

Tripped in the snow and made a 50 yard putt. Held good boundaries. Wrote, messy & free. Played the Yaak Valley guitar with Rick Bass and Deb Marquart. Woke up at 2:30am to catch a plane & glimpsed my old life. 

Stuffed pear french toast. Ocean dip in a blizzard. Treehouse magic. Lilacs. Handed someone the keys to their memoir. Paddled the Kenduskeag. Glow-in-the-dark ukulele. Packed my suitcase a whole day before I had to go somewhere. 

Hiked the Camino (that one was in big letters, and went on for two weeks). Ate messy with my fingers and savored. Frolicked. Danced at a wedding in a hot purple dress. Didn’t abandon myself. Joy ran at the edge of a hurricane. SAW A MOOSE. Spoke in front of 300 middle schoolers. Sang with a jazz pianist. Fell asleep with mist on my face & my back against a pine tree. 

Fit too much into a day & didn’t fuck up. Kind of fucked up but was kind to myself. Listened to my body. Made it through the week. Thunderstorm & candlelight. Messed about in boats. 

Summer blackberries. Power tools. Warm rain. Queer outdoor joy. A kayak race in jorts. A surprise saxophone concert under the milky way with my students. Moved at the speed of presence. Held myself & others & did not rush grief. Saw a bobcat. Hugged dear friends across the country. Threw the disc in the can jam. Touched the heart of the book again. My family, alive and breathing. 

If this sounds like it’s for you, I hope you try it. Highlights from December so far are puppy snuggles, big snowflakes, accidentally showed up at the bar wearing the same shirt as my Tinder date, housecooling arepas (we really did move on Saturday), and deep rest. Who knows what today will turn up.

Happy Solstice, friends. There’s always time for eggs.