The thing that they don’t tell you when you are filling out the grad school applications is that if you are accepted into a program and if you intend to complete that program in a timely manner, your relationship with time will change completely. This happens gradually with different phases, but with the same result – all those things that you used to do for the simple pleasure of doing them – those things that did not render up a finished product or did not immediately and meaningfully contribute to a current project – those things become unsustainable. Suddenly there is no time for them. No time at all. Even when there is time, it is not linear time that can be used as one would like, but time that is connected to the time necessary to complete each and every unfinished assignment. A web of time and first and second and final drafts and incomplete research and unprepared lectures and piles of reading and more piles of writing all interconnected until it is impossible to know where one stops and the other starts and no matter what, there is not enough time for it all.
I spent years of my life just wishing for each day to come to an end so I could be done with it – never looking forward to the next, but simply satisfied that the time was passing. Those days time couldn’t pass fast enough. In my foolish 20 year old heart I assumed that it would never change – that I would be passing time for the rest of my life. I was so wrong and yet right that I am sometimes amazed at my own path.
Yesterday I took a day for myself to spend some time with a friend doing something that I love – playing in the snow. I had an unorthodox childhood – my introduction to the suburbs was late and lacked any of the sense of “safety” that originally drove families out into the hinterlands. Instead I spent my childhood living on the edge of some of the last truly wild land left. Winter was serious business in the little town I called home. The town itself was nestled in a shallow but expansive valley up in the mountains. The horizon was framed by mountain peaks on all sides, and the foothills to the next range were within walking distance of the one traffic light in town. They would close school on snow days, and on days when the temperature dropped so low that it was dangerous for kids to walk the few blocks to school. The town was mostly poor, and many kids didn’t have good cold weather clothes. I remember girls walking to middle school wearing light jackets on below 0 days, their hands and faces numb and pale from the cold.
And I remember the times I got so cold that I was sure I would never be warm again – the times I got ice in my boots – that never melted even though it spent hours against my skin – the times I lost all feeling in my hands from the elbows down, the times I would come home with strange patches of white on my nose and cheeks and ears. I remember the times it ached to stand next to the wood stove.
There are also parts that I have tried to forget. Like the mornings I put on a dress over my tights and winter boots and long coat and went and stood in the cold on a neighbor’s porch to explain the bible to them. The mornings that the car holding the missionary group would get stuck in the snow and I would be out with the women in their nylons and the men in their pressed slacks trying to push it until the tires could get traction on the dirty brown ice. I remember feeling almost naked in my JC Penny dress and white nylons as the cold wind blew right through me – chilling to the bone.
Yet when we left, the thing that I missed most – more than the mountains or the people or the town or the home was the weather – the seasons – the snow. I missed that unambiguous cold. I could not get used to days of 40 degrees that felt so much colder than the below 0 I knew. I desperately missed the wood stove with its obvious heat source – its “stand here and be warm simplicity”. I missed standing out under the huge pine trees – the ones so old and sturdy that the first heavy snow would create surprisingly warm caves around the trunks. I missed the frozen ground and the clean whiteness of the cold. I was not prepared for green grass in winter and mud mud mud everywhere. It felt unnatural. Wrong.
It has been over 20 years since I left the snow country. Yet every time I get a chance to return to the snow I feel like I have reconnected to that child who used to dig snow tunnels from the front door of her house to the mailbox on the street. This year I have decided to make an effort to allow myself some of that time. Yet the expense… Oye the expense. The monetary expense is one thing. Nothing is free. Nothing should be free. And I accept that. But the time expense? The time that is so intrinsically intertwined with my every waking moment that I can never forget what I “should” be doing? That expense is usurious.
I’ve come to realize that a major part of my current malaise regarding my studies has nothing to do with the topic or the teachers or anything so simple and accessible. It is because I am tired of living without creativity and intrigue and fascination and curiosity and danger. I need change and risk and time to squander figuring out how stuff works and how to make the things I find interesting. I hate feeling guilty for reading literature or studying 19th century costumes or sliding down the mountain as the falling snow absorbs every unnatural sound into a kind of natural white noise.
There is irony in this guilt. My intellectual stores are empty. Creativity and fascination and adventures are my intellectual nourishment, and the less I have given over to these pursuits, the less I have had to spend on long-winded papers and in-depth studies. I feel like I’ve been regurgitating the same things over and over – a sort of superficial moral outrage cloaked in academic language that I pass off as analysis. It goes nowhere. Yet I have nothing to supplement it with – no art, no music, no emotion.
Only memories. And those are… tainted.
One winter, when I was 12 I was riding one of our horses in the far pasture near the marsh. She was not my favorite horse – but I was one of the few people who could exact obedience out of her when she was feeling obstinate. That afternoon she was unusually nervous – a storm was coming, and the temperature had dropped remarkably fast in a very short time. I was ready to turn back to the barn when she started bucking on the ice. We both went down hard, my leg under her side, and my head hitting the solid ice with a crack that echoed in my ears. I was lucky that I did not get tangled in the saddle, and that she did not crush me in her struggle to stand. She was the largest horse we had at the time. She was long gone when I came to – the second time I had been knocked unconscious (adventure and I are close companions) and I remember lying there on the ice, very aware that I needed to move, that I was so very cold, that my head hurt and my ears were ringing and that nobody would know where I was or would come looking for me for hours and that it was getting dark and that stupid horse was still wearing my saddle. But I so wanted to sleep. For just a little while. Just a nap really.
I didn’t sleep there on the ice. In the end, it was the saddle that made me get up and walk back to the barn. I broke a cardinal rule that day. I did not get back on the horse that had thrown me – and I was never confident on that animal again. But I did unsaddle her, water the rest of the horses and walk home just as the wind picked up and the temperature dropped well past freezing. I fell asleep on the sofa in front of the wood stove. I didn’t tell my mother until later what had happened. I’d likely had a concussion. Not the first or the last. Still, not something to take lightly.
These days I feel like I am still lying on the ice. I know that I cannot stay where I am. The list of concerns running through my mind are long and serious and paralyzing. I just want to rest. Just a quick nap. But the time to move is coming. I just hope that this time, when the time comes to finish what I need to finish, I’ll have the motivation to get up off the ice, and walk through the frozen pastures to the barn and finish my chores.
And hopefully, when my time is mine again, it will all have been worth it.
SecondHand Saint 