Recently, I’ve struggled to understand the passage of time, as I’m sure many others have as well. One of my biggest struggles has been the realization that I can’t hold onto any of it. There’s something strangely bittersweet about learning how to be present while acknowledging that you’ll never be in that moment again. To me, passing time is an art: something that is meant to be interpreted and experienced, something that evokes emotion and ideas. Someone I know incredibly well, who could be described as my close and personal friend, has explored this art just as much as I’d like to understand it: Mary Oliver. The great poet herself devoted her career to understanding how her life intersected with the nature around it, and what this all meant in the greater context of the world. As I’ve begun to move through the art of passing time, Oliver has held my hand through it all.
The art of paying attention
As a first-year student, I’ve been reminded countless times that college is a transitional period of my life. With this comes a constant awareness that everything is changing, my friendships are evolving, and moments I love won’t last forever. This awareness has caused me to develop a great fear of the present becoming the past before I’ve had the chance to fully experience it. I, like so many others, have become so conscious about wanting to remember my life that sometimes it becomes difficult to simply live it.
“Next time what I’d do is look at the earth before saying anything. I’d stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still.”
Oliver, Mary. “Next time” Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010
So, my question is: What happens when I stop trying to hold onto my life and start paying attention to it? Thankfully, my good friend Mary Oliver has given me a few instructions to explore this: “Pay Attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
With Oliver’s instructions in mind, I decided to spend the next week approaching my life a little differently: distracting myself less, observing the world around me more, and learning what it means to truly be present.
a week in the world of Mary oliver
Seventy minutes, four miles, and no headphones to quiet the loudness of the world around me. Somehow, despite my best efforts to forget about time, it was all I could think about.
Armed with Oliver’s instructions, my first task involved a brisk walk with no headphones on. Just me and the nature around me. I marched forth into the world and let my feet guide me, open to wherever my mind would lead me to. I aimed to walk for 30 minutes, scared that I would overwhelm myself if I went on too long without music blasting out the thoughts in my head.
As I continued to walk, I kept catching myself deep in thought about how much time had passed, or questioning whether or not this experiment was worth doing. There was a strange self-awareness that I acknowledged to be a sort of shamefulness: How do I fit into the world Oliver aimed to preserve, when I can’t seem to slow down my brain? Soon, the 30-minute brisk walk turned into 70 minutes, and my thoughts seemed to flow away. When I journaled about the experience, I compared the fleeting thoughts to the dancing blades of grass, both moving through the world synonymously with the wind.
Oliver has been a good friend of mine since my junior year of high school, and she truly has “seen” the worst parts of me and the best parts of me. Whether you’re 16 and relearning how to drive after your first car wreck, 17 and experiencing your first breakup, 18 and applying to college, or 19 and learning how to be independent, Oliver truly has a poem for it all. When I began this week with her, every moment since my junior year came flooding back — when you begin exploring the act of being present, it’s hard not to explore the past, and as anyone who loves Oliver would do, I turned to her poems.
“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
Oliver, Mary. “In Blackwater Woods” American Primitive, Little, Brown and Company, 1983
to let it go.”
Living in this complicated, ever-changing world can be difficult and unforgiving. As the week went on, I thought upon the instructions Oliver gave me, and continued to pay attention. I sat and observed the world for seven days straight, hoping that a revelation would occur, and hoping that I wouldn’t have to let go of any of the time that was passing.
Each day, I tackled a new task: the first day consisting of my 70 minute walk, the second day I sat for 30 minutes with nothing but my thoughts to accompany me, the third day I had to observe something temporary without photographing it, the fourth day I noticed three small moments that made my day meaningful, the fifth day I spent intentional, phone-free time with people who mattered, the sixth day I reflected upon a familiar place and acknowledged what changed, and the seventh day, I rested.
By the final, seventh day, I thought that I would have this whole experiment figured out and my “if…” and “then…” statement should’ve been solved in some way… I can confidently say that there was no grand revelation about how to let time pass. Each day, as I went on to tackle my task, I practiced being present, and surely, like any skill, I began to grow stronger in it.
to love what cannot last
Learning how to let time pass is not something that can be achieved within a week. In fact, I think it’s something I may never be able to achieve. Spending my week with Oliver, I’ve realized that to learn how to be present, you also have to learn how to grieve and let go. Yes, it’s incredibly disorienting to watch each day go by without the ability to slow the world down for just one moment. After all, I’ve almost completed my first semester of college when it feels like I just graduated high school a week ago; however, I think the art of learning to let time pass is in the acknowledgment that you may never learn how to do so.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
Oliver, Mary. “Wild Geese” Dream Work, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Like any art, you’re allowed to interpret and experience it differently second by second, hour by hour, day by day. And like any art, it’s constantly evolving and becoming something new. Mary Oliver and her very “wild geese” can teach us all a little bit about patience and forgiveness — I think I’ll save that for my next experiment.
So, in Oliver’s wise words: “You do not have to be good…”