The days are long, but the years are short.
I can’t remember where I read that. Somewhere, presumably, in the small pool of books I’ve swum through in the last few years. Something about life with a very small child. Maybe one of the parenting ones, but it feels a little too generalised, too cheesy. True, though. The days are long. Yesterday I went to bed at nine o’clock to stop the day getting any longer, though admittedly yesterday wasn’t really the child’s fault.
The years? I don’t know. The last two-and-three-quarter years actually feel like they’ve lasted quite a long time, but they’re part of a six year stretch that seems to have been working on a different calendar entirely. That said, I’m not sure how I’m forty, or how I’ve suddenly been working for the same organisation for fifteen years.
What I really notice, though, are the weeks. Now we’re in a routine where many things happen once, and only once, a week, it’s amazing how they fly by. Rhyme Time again? Well, yes, it’s Friday. I suppose it does feel like quite a long time since Friday, but even so. And then you miss one Rhyme Time, go to the next two, are away for the one after that, and then fail to get out of the door for the last one, and there’s a month gone. And again, the weeks feel like they last forever as they’re happening, but they’re gone just like that. Work deadlines rear up at me out of the darkness. Lent just didn’t seem to happen and suddenly it’s half-way through April and we’re well into Easter season.
My evenings, too, I’ve set aside for particular things, in the hope that I’ll get at least something done. Monday for making, Friday for mending. Tuesday for writing (no, collapsing into bed at 9pm did not allow me to write anything, but I’m feeling better for it today). Saturday for keeping in touch with people. Wednesday for whatever I feel like. The weeks go fast and I get very little done in them. And that’s just the way it is.
I can see it happening, the days I take the train to London. One week I’m waking up in the dark, turning my bike lights on before I cycle to the station, ten minutes into the train journey before the sun comes up over frosty fens. Next week, the sky’s beginning to get light in the east as I huff my way up the hill. The clocks go forward, and we’re back to square one, but not quite. A week later, I’m watching the sunrise from a bench. A week after that, my daylight-powered motivation is sufficiently recharged for me to get out of the door half an hour earlier (you know you’re early when you meet the Cambridge University women’s rowing team coming out of the station on your way in). Another week, and I don’t need the bike lights. And every time, the sunrise is swinging further and further round to the north, and a week is just the right gap to make it really obvious. In a very beautiful way, though.
Which leaves me – where? Somewhere in the middle of a world that seems to be spinning very fast. Perhaps I just need to let it. There’s nothing I can do about the sunrise. Perhaps all I need to do is notice it, enjoy it, slow time back down by not trying to make the best use of it, whatever that even would have been.
Anyway, I’ll see you next week. Probably.
Kathleen Jowitt 