Dispatches From Siberia #50: Time
Yesterday, I had a lunch break.
My fellow lunchtime sunbasker.
This doesn’t seem like it should be too revolutionary. Not newsworthy, maybe not even interesting. But despite purposefully carving out time for a lunch break twice a week—something I hadn’t managed in a number of years—that lunch break generally descends into a quick trip to a fast food place, then a battle to digest while circling the faculty lots, vulture-like and ready to run down the first open parking space. Then, a quick sprint back to whatever task awaits.
Yesterday, though, I put everything down and left. The student essays, the paperwork, the emails—personal and professional—that needed to be answered. The good parking space. The half-finished Chemex beaker of coffee.
I drove home, boiled some fresh ravioli, splashed it in olive oil and black pepper, then led the puppy onto the back porch. I ate. Eeyore sat on my lap. The sun drove down on us, maybe with that kind of warmth for the last time this year.
It was quiet. It was slow. It was beautiful.
It was antithetical to everything else in life.
It's not just me. This is kind of what we do now, right? Our public greetings turn into weird blending complaint/boasts about our busy-ness. We make up committees and tasks and chores, listifying and quantifying, building resumes and CVs, building tenure records and business portfolios. As a professor, this is part of the game: higher ed has been careening toward the ruthless ledge of quantification madness for years.
We’re number-mad and we push ourselves endlessly, even if what we’re pushing for isn’t all that important. But it feels like it should be. It feels like every task is critical and imminently due, like we’re crushing someone’s soul if their report isn’t complete immediately, if their email isn’t answered in real time, if their essay isn’t auto-graded the instant it’s submitted.
Numbers are exhausting, and we’ve made them our oxygen.
This summer, I went to my first Major League Baseball game in a couple years. I was greeted with crushing intensity and needlessly elevated stress: a giant countdown clock on the scoreboard, prompting the pitcher to decide already and let loose the ball a little quicker.
When we’re even in a hurry at a baseball game, something’s gone off the rails.
But those seconds ticking off the clock are numbers, and numbers are connected to money. And numbers are oxygen and money is money and that’s all it takes to kneecap a century or so of leisure.
In the middle of all of that, the things I’m grateful for can’t be revolutionary. They aren’t newsworthy, or even interesting, maybe. The things I’m grateful for in this moment of live and this instant of time are quiet and fleeting: warm pasta balanced on my lap while nine pounds’ worth of dachshund squims into just the most advantageous sun-gathering spot.
Nothing. Else.
I’m grateful for that half hour of small quiet, of fleeting warmth, of tiny comfort, of the chance, when it comes, to finally exhale.
