Susan Pitchford

“When the time bind catches me, it seems impossible to come out ahead. I have gotten too little done, or I have done so very much that I failed to share time with people I love. Anger at myself contends against anger at others, whether they be fritterers or workaholics or simply people who need me more than I can afford to be needed. Time becomes an arena of anguish, and the genuine hardships I face in trying to juggle the demands take on an added dimension of pain. When this is so, I arise weary each day, trying once again to pull together enough energy to earn the air I breathe.”
Dorothy C. Bass, “Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time”

Today is the first day of Winter Quarter, and I woke up thinking about time. The break seemed unusually short this year: I turned in my grades on Monday, falling face-down over the finish line, and three days later it was Christmas Eve. I barely took notice of Advent this year, and a couple days after Christmas it was time to get my winter courses together. I’m feeling the weight of phone calls not made, emails not answered, friends and family neglected, work left undone. Like most of the people I know, I experience the mismatch between the time I have and the time I seem to need as a source of anxiety, guilt and pain. And like a few of them, I am chronically late because I have unrealistic ideas about how much activity a given unit of time can contain. An extra ten minutes before it’s time to leave will see me embark on a thirty minute project, and every single time I’m genuinely surprised to find myself running late.

So I woke up thinking about time, and how mercilessly it drives us. I’ve known for a while now that I need a new relationship to time, since our current relationship isn’t working and, short of death, there is no way we can end it. Instead of dying, I picked up Dorothy Bass’s book. Bass understands the need for a new relationship with time, and she calls us to conversion, to turn from a state in which time is an oppressive master, and begin to receive time as a gift:

“Christian practices for opening the gift of time resist the inhumane rhythms that shape so much of contemporary life. And resistance to these patterns is just what we need. Most of us won’t opt out of them altogether, discarding our clocks and calendars in a moment of revolutionary upheaval. Nor should we, for to do so would be to abandon a world in need, a world precious to God and to us. But to resist – to lean against these patterns with our minds and our actions, to subvert them, to refuse to see the world as they insist it be seen – this we can and must do. Such resistance does not require allegiance to a predetermined set of rules. It does require critical mindfulness of the patterns within which we presently live and expectant attention to the possibility that God might have something better in mind for us. And it requires practice, the patient learning of new ways.”