“And whispered: what will we do with time…”
What used to be a new career for me is now something I have been doing for ten years. The people who used to be my new friends have now been on an “adventure” with me year after year, and I on theirs. Even in our diffuse lifestyles — with all the projects, cities, trips, and pivots — our network now pulsates on a deeper level, grown closely together. If I ever was a hot new thing, I am no longer.
In conflicts, sometimes people who love and misunderstand me accuse me I want money because they don’t know that what I want is time. More and more, I am noticing time tightening around me and no amount of historical thinking or transcendental meditation will change its finitude. That however snugly and warmly lives may settle in together, all the communes we build — the work we do together, the experiences we make exist, the ideas born because we waited or fought — have an expiry date both unforeseeable and unchangeable. In the moments when I know this consciously, I suffer. In the moments when I push it to the back of my mind, I have work ethic. Every moment of my life I am aware the only value there is is simultaneity.
I often find myself gasping for air facing this fact that makes treasures out of people, the people who make my life happen in collusion with me, and gives me unbearable impatience with them. Do they not know that we are here now and that that is the thing and there is no other thing?
Where I grew up, the film and theater people banded together for months and lived like a big hunter-gatherer family: they hunted for camera angles and fame, and gathered new gigs and new hearts and tabloid articles about themselves. At each disbanding, inevitable when you wrap up a filming or a run, my child’s heart would break, and it didn’t make it better that I knew some of these folks I would soon see again, at some other filming, behind some other stage. With some of them, I wanted certainty. I got none.
Putting down my roots in America, these old memories from 1990s Budapest become vivid again, the child who never threw tantrums about this is throwing them now. How tight it is around my throat — with the days, with fears, with grief and with longing — to know how I’m afloat stuck in this uninhabitably tiny barrel of time, and no amount of writing and thinking and legacy-making and ego-flexing can change that, no hope about the future can make my elbows and knees not hurt so squeezed into my allotted little hole, no amount of open empty sky above from the vantage point of which of course none of our heartbreaks down here matter, and no wisdom about the movements of times and peoples can stop me from reaching out to grab those I don’t want to see floating away.
Oh, this paragraph:
"[T]he film and theater people banded together for months and lived like a big hunter-gatherer family ... At each disbanding, inevitable when you wrap up a filming or a run, my child’s heart would break, and it didn’t make it better that I knew some of these folks I would soon see again, at some other filming, behind some other stage."
This is an emotion I experience so often, even as an adult. I feel it even after a really great party or event, and I always think, Ugh, why do we have to go through this part? Why can't the good part last forever? My old theater friends totally get it, but I often have to explain it to others. I used to call it "instant nostalgia."
Love the post!!
Great reflections. Dare I say it gets worse with age!