The Last Word On Nothing

It is me again, with my hopeful calendars! I originally wrote this post in January 2020, when the calendar did seem like a place where you could write something on a certain date and there would be a reasonable chance that it would come to pass.

I feel much more timid now, three years on. Over the weekend, I fell into a bit of a funk, where the calendars (so many still!) seemed like one more burden to add to an already weighted year.

Here’s what helped: I didn’t look at my phone today. I went for a run with a friend, I went for a walk with my family. I did the laundry, I cleaned the kitchen, I read the paper, I took a nap. I didn’t try to listen to a podcast at the same time, I didn’t check how much rain fell last night, I didn’t take just a quick look at what the weather would be later this week. I felt terrible at first, and then I felt better. When I did get back online, the first things I looked at were two of my favorite newsletters, Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse by Devin Kelly and An Irritable Métis by Chris La Tray.

Maybe it is not a coincidence that they are both poets, and that what they wrote helped me to open a new calendar at last. When I did, all the rows of blank spaces seemed less like burdens, or days that might be judged by what may or may not come to pass. Maybe each open square was its own small mystery, a poem of an ordinary day.

*

So, on Monday I went away to get some writing done. I was at a cheap AirBnB 10 minutes from my house. It’s the first week in January, and although I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, I wanted some time at the beginning of the year to see where I was on some various projects. And to work on my calendars.

Oh, I love new calendars. The year has so much promise! All those empty squares! I actually have four calendars. One is a big Ansel Adams that goes in the kitchen—I get the same one every year—with big things like birthdays and days off and trips. Then I have my phone and a daybook, which both have appointments and interviews and when I’m supposed to pick up and drop off different kids to different activities.  I like the phone because my husband and I can both see what’s going on; I like the paper calendar because it helps me see the week as a whole and writing down each entry by hand helps me remember. And then (then!) I have another, more substantial-looking inspirational sort of calendar where I try to write in the things I want to focus on most—writing, surfing, yoga, adventures. Cheesy, I know, but I can tell I’m getting off track when I stop writing in it.

At least these calendars all have the same number of days. If I’d been filling out calendars in 1752,  I would have lost eleven whole days. (Other problems: There would be no Ansel Adams calendar. There definitely wouldn’t be the one that said things like, “Put self-care on your schedule this week, and treat it like any other important appointment” either. And the daybook, which is decorated with the phases of the moon and lists Celtic holidays like Imbolc and Samhain, might have meant that I filled most of my days with escaping witch hunts.) That’s the year that Britain and all its colonies switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. They needed to lose these days to catch up.

I can lose a day without any official mandate. And it seems like I’m losing more of them every year, the calendar pages shuffling by at time-lapse speed. Last year, Duke engineering professor Adrian Bejan described the reason why he thought time seems to speed up as we get older in the European Review. He attributes this acceleration to the slow down in our mental processing time. As we get older, our brains can’t take in and integrate as many images as quickly as we once did; because we’re getting fewer images during the same amount of time, it affects how we perceive the time. [When I posted this previously, brave reader Sara O’Donnell recommended the word zenosyne, the sense that time appears to be moving faster and faster, particularly as we get older.]

“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth,” said Bejan in a 2019 press release. “It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”

Maybe I like my calendars because they pin the time down to something I can see. They make it seem measurable, perhaps something that I could even control. But looking back at my last year’s calendars, I saw those weeks where I forgot to write anything at all. Were those days faster or slower, more or less of what I hoped they would be? Was I really off track, or was I just living?

Still, I couldn’t help myself.  The sun was rising out the window of the studio—the only marker of time I would need on a day where I could truly do whatever I wanted. But first, I opened my calendar and began to write.