We really don’t have that kind of time.
In her book “Bird by Bird” Saint Anne Lamott tells a story about dress shopping with her best friend Pammy, in the year Pammy was dying of cancer. Anne was looking for a dress to wear on a date, not her typical wardrobe, and she came out of the fitting room modeling the dress for Pammy, feeling “very shy and self-conscious and pleased.” Then she asked Pammy, “Do you think it makes my hips look too big?” Pammy answered, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.” It’s always made me laugh but lately I get it in my bones.
As the covid drips of days have turned into a massive waterfall of strangeness, as oppression and injustice seem to run rampant, as more people are reported dead in the New York Times body count, I just keep thinking about Pammy’s near-death wisdom. In the middle of muscle memory and knee-jerk worries about small stuff, I’ll catch myself and say, “Oh ash, we just don’t have that kind of time anymore.” I used to think I had that kind of time. The time spent controlling everyone else around me; their choices, their beliefs, their pains and traumas and fatal flaws. I used to think I had the kind of time where I could treat loved ones poorly, abuse their kidnesses, and come back later to apologize. I used to think I had time to waste on social media scrolling mindlessly until I hated myself or someone else. I used to think I had time to worry about my legs, or what I now lovingly refer to as my covid-thighs. As my therapist said a couple of weeks ago, “At some point you just get to the point where you say, ‘okay, I guess these are my legs now.’”
Each day, something happens to make me fear the world is falling apart, that human kindness and love have gotten lost in the political swirl of it all. Daily, souls are dying of what others experience as just a bad cold and still others claim is “a hoax.” The town we live in, with its long racist history, does not feel like a safe place for my Black son who grows bigger by the day. In the fall, it won’t be safe for either him or his high school brothers to return to school face to face, largely because of others' negligence and refusals to take Covid seriously.
Because of Zion’s health issues, we’ve been quarantined since March. In that time, I’ve crisis-schooled a special needs child with medical and cognitive disabilities, tried to counsel my teenagers through these unprecedented days while taking away most of their freedoms, stayed married, kept up with therapy and recovery and writing group, continued spiritual deconstruction and the rebuilding of my faith, kept writing for a column as well as my book, and have joined a committee in my town on a project that will bring honor to Black souls that lived and died in our community. I’ve also decided to go back to school in the fall and finally finish the college education I started twenty years ago. You know, easy stuff.
Things have changed this year. They have changed so much that I’ve cried and mourned and slept and yelled big loud fuck words at the sky. In the wake of all the change, there’s plenty I no longer have time for. It’s taken my weak arms swimming through some serious waves of grief until I get water up my nose to help me start coming to terms with this: I now feel released to laser-focus on what I DO have time for.
These days the questions I ask sound like, “What is my work for today? What is the good I can and must contribute to this one day? What is the work that only I can do today? And how can I do that work and still stay connected to the realm of awareness of Divine Love within me?” Because the rest of it - the worrying about my face wrinkles or thigh dimples or if I’m losing followers or if I can save everyone from Johnald Schrimp - well, I just don’t have that kind of time.
These days I try to find time for some or all of the following:
Meditation
Incense
Music
Humor
Coffee / Tea
Eye contact
Yoga
Research
Writing
Reading
Deep breaths
Orgasm
Conversations
Sunlight
Rest
And when my phone alerts me, “Your screen time was down 43% last week” I breathe even deeper and sink into the richness of all of the work I did, the healing and loving and listening and lamenting and laughing and creating, that was mine and only mine to do. And I feel grateful.
I don’t know how you are braving the deluge of these days. I can only hope you are spending your time in ways that are gentle, that help you inhale and exhale love, as much as possible. I hope your work brings deep fulfillment and pursues equity for others, even if it’s hard. I hope some hours are spent loving your remarkable, impermanent, beloved self and the not-here-forever ones around you. If not, I hope these words become a permission-giving mantra for whatever your soul needs in these strange, strange days. So many lives have been lost and nothing is guaranteed for next month - not mine, not yours, not those we love. In light of it all, there’s so much we really don’t have time for anymore.
Or as Pammy said, dear one,
“I really don’t think you have that kind of time.”
I’m sending you all the love I can from here, right in the middle of the falls.
