Using time to be both the acorn and the oak

There’s this cliché that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on Earth. An astronomer kindly went through the trouble of looking into this and found that the number of stars was actually roughly equivalent to the number of grains of sand on all the Earth’s beaches. (Note, just the beaches, not the deserts or other sandy locales).

Considering I can’t even quantify the total number grains of sand that fall out of a toddler’s shoes after a visit to the playground, this still seems like an immense number of stars to me. Incomprehensible.

And if your mind isn’t sufficiently blown, consider that in 10 drops of water, you’ll find the same number of molecules as all the stars in the universe.

This can make a person feel very small. And also very large, maybe (How many galaxies are contained in the droplets of water that make up the human body?).

Like, if our sun were a grain of sand and our planet is a microscopic bit orbiting that grain of sand, are we even detectable? Do we even show up on the cosmic radar?

And if not, what am I even doing here? All this sweeping of the kitchen floor and washing of cereal bowls? If we’re just an atom of existence riding on the back of a grain of sand amidst seemingly infinite expanses of sand, should I even be worried about all the cat hair?

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately.

Mostly because it seems like there’s more of it at the moment. And despite that, I feel like I’m doing less with it than maybe I should. Or maybe I’ve been doing way more than necessary. The days that float by are hard to pin down. To make note of.

I’ve been thinking about how time, on the days when all Annie wants to do is take apart the same puzzle over and over again, flinging the pieces across the floor, feels tedious. Like a barbell chained around my neck. How all I can do is count the hours until she’s sleeping or I’m sleeping. How she’s 2 already. And though I’ve done this thing with the babies and toddlers already, it’s no less shocking how they change at the same speed as the calamity they create. She is so much herself. Her own person. But just over two years ago I was carrying her in me- she was a part of me. This series of diving cells. Her as a separate independent entity was just this idea.

And Lily- Lily’s almost 10. And all legs. And daily, she’ll try to fold herself in my lap. But no amount of bending contains her. And just over 10 years ago, I was carrying her in me and she was this idea. This series of dividing cells.

With the school year getting underway and my job starting up, I feel as if time is going to become a precious commodity in short order. And maybe I’ve been squandering it on all these walks to visit the turtles and pick blackberries. All the times I’ve had to draw Donald Duck on demand or read “Road Builders” and “Mickey Mouse’s Picnic.”

Though 20 years from now, when the kids are all grown and gone, I know this time won’t have been squandered. I’ll pine for it. Look back on it as the most precious.

Time has a way of shifting our outlooks. Re-shaping our memories.

It’s always interesting to me how we devalue the way we spend our own time, and celebrate the way other people spend their time. How no matter how hard we try, we won’t ever quite feel like our time measures up to other people’s time.

I was chatting with a friend the other day. She’s brilliant. Always has been. She was the valedictorian of our graduating class. Now she’s an assistant professor of geoscience at a big university.

During our conversation, she mentioned something about how she wasn’t a good PhD because PhDs are supposed to be confident and decisive and when it came time to defending her dissertation years ago, she didn’t feel like she was either. Why? Because while researching the role microorganisms play in biogeochemical cycling (don’t worry, I’m not quite sure what that means either… I just borrowed this from her university profile) – she had to pick between two bacterial family trees to base her conclusions on. Both family trees were accepted by the scientific community. And she spent time studying both before deciding which one she’d use in her dissertation.

But she wonders about what would’ve happen if she chose the other tree. She would’ve come to a completely different conclusion. So how could she stand by her research and say definitively that it was true when she knew if she had chosen the other tree the results would’ve told a totally different story?

Though my friend didn’t ask for it, I decided she needed a pep talk. Even if it was several years too late.

Although I’m not science-y. I love science. And scientists.

I love how a person can devote themselves to the inspection and observation of a thing– say a particular type of bacteria. Or the fungus of the Pacific Northwest. Or the dust that inhabits deep space. I’m guessing the scientists would argue with me on this, but I kind of think to observe a thing so closely is an act of love. Or appreciation at the very least.

It’s art, even, I think. Art is about studying the structures, the movements, the interactions, the doings of the unnoticed things around us. It’s about interpreting how those things contribute to the story of the whole. The mapping of our existence here.

At times, both art and science give me goosebumps.

For instance, I was listening to RadioLab the other day and there was this moment when they were talking about how sand from the Sahara Desert, which includes dried up bits of prehistoric creatures, gets picked up in the breeze and travels around the world in the form of storms, raining little dust nutrients that feed oxygen-producing phytoplankton in the ocean and fertilizing the Amazon Rainforest, aiding the survival of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Imagine that, for a second. One of the least lively places on earth feeding one of the most lively.

I digress.

Over the phone, I gave my friend various bullet points about why her work mattered and why she should stand by it and be proud of it and herself for completing it.

I told her I thought she should own her research, despite its “choose your own adventure” family tree situation, because she didn’t conduct it blindly. She hand’t selected a tree by throwing a dart at a board or flipping a coin. She learned about both and made an informed decision.

Second, she could own her research based on the fact that she, out of the other billions of people on this Earth, was the one who gave her time and energy to the study of this little bacteria. And because of that, she got to be an authority on it.

Third, her research was just one small part of the story. It wasn’t ever going to be the final piece of the puzzle. The thing that answered all the questions about all that was and is and will be. But her research was a piece that would enable others to see the larger picture more clearly. And by being a participant in that process of curiosity, questioning and discovery, she was directly engaging with the magic of life as a sentient being.

I wasn’t nearly this articulate over the phone. I might not even being all that articulate right now.

After I got off the phone, I kept thinking about my friend and the way she viewed her work as being, somehow, “less than.”

I do this all the time in my own work, of course. Whether I’m prodding kids to do their work at school or writing here or screwing plastic bottle caps onto plywood. I’m routinely dismissive of my usefulness or importance. Of the necessity of what I’m doing.

But I do it anyway. Because some voice buried deeper in my psyche urges me onward. “Ignore the cynical part of us,” it whispers. “Persist.”

Recently, I was messaging with Brad’s cousin (who I suppose is my cousin by marriage?). She’s a wonderful choreographer and dance teacher at a small college in Vermont. I know even less about dance than I do about science, but the work Pauline has shared with me is profound and thought-provoking.

One piece she made about a town straddling the U.S.-Canada border that serves as one of the few places in the world where loved ones affected by U.S. travel bans can meet face-to-face, was moving for how it broke down barriers and showed the tenuousness of our time together. And another piece following two individuals as they navigate Shanghai in search of contact with the wild left me aching to climb trees and dip my feet in creeks in the midst of my suburban life. It is clear, there is this immense current of creativity moving through Brad’s cousin- inviting her to synthesize her stories through movement. It’s beautiful to witness. Yet even she doubts its usefulness.

We were messaging back and forth recently and she shared this:

“At this moment, I’m constantly questioning whether my art is deserving of any attention or should be taking up any space. At the end of the day, I need it for some sense of sanity and feeling that I exist as an individual.”

Whether it’s the tedium of carefully collecting and documenting specimens in the field, or studying slide after slide under a microscope, putting down word after word on the screen or screwing down cap after cap on the wood, the joy is in the process. It’s each stroke on the canvas. Each aching pirouette. Each blistered finger flying across the instrument. It’s in the doing for the pure joy of the doing. It’s in the claiming of ourselves as individuals. It’s a way to anchor into our time here on this fleck of space debris.

Years ago, I read the wonderful “Lab Girl” a memoir by geobiologist Hope Jahren about, among other things, her experiences as a female scientist coping with manic depression and sexism. In one chapter, she reunites with her long-term research partner in Ireland. I can’t remember, but one or the other was dealing with a major disappointment or setback. The trip was a consolation or an escape of sorts. They had a wide open day together with no real plan. So they settled for walking the countryside and fell into their common language and passion: studying the fauna surrounding them. Before long they’d decided to collect moss specimens from around where they were venturing- hundreds and hundreds of them. They documented where they collected the specimen and planned to study the differences under a microscope back at their lab. Only, when they got to the airport for the trip home, they didn’t have the proper paperwork to transport the moss overseas. So they watched as it was dumped unceremoniously into a trashcan by a security agent.

I mean, it was kind of depressing, right? All that work, just gone. But the scene sticks with me. And I wonder if the two felt the day they gathered all that moss was wasted. Time that had been squandered. The romantic side of me likes to think that they don’t regret wandering the Irish countryside digging in the dirt.

In the book Jahren writes about feeling like an ant, “driven to find and carry single dead needles, one after the other, all the way across the forest and add them one by one by one to the pile so massive I can only fully imagine one small corner of it … insufficient and anonymous but stronger than I look and part of something much bigger than I am.”

That is how I think of my friend. I mean, in my mind, she’s not just some anonymous ant toiling away building a pile of dead needles. But rather, she’s that being, like all of us who chose to ignore the cynical voices in favor of creation and study, who is driven to contribute to the whole, despite only understanding one tiny piece of it.

And by doing so, she’s creating this gift for the rest of us today. And for future generations who can build off her findings.

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life,” Jahren writes.

Another meditation on time crept on me while listening to “This American Life.”

In it, composer and musician Jerome Ellis shares about speaking at an annual New Year’s Eve performance event in New York City featuring more than 150 artists from all artistic backgrounds.

A producer from This American Life was at the event the year Ellis performed. In the interview he shares in detail how unexpected and uncomfortable Ellis’s appearance was at first. How the audience wasn’t sure what to make of him.

Ellis has a stutter. He tells the producer about what it’s like living with it and how it affects his experiences walking through the world. Rather than calling it his stutter, he likes to call it “The Stutter.”

The Stutter, he explains, is a happening both the speaker and the listener contends with.

He’ll have breaks in his speech where his body freezes. He says it’s like being in a suspended state– as if in prayer. He’s just waiting for the words to arrive. When the word arrives, he’ll return to the room.

What caught my attention, was how Ellis talks about The Stutter with affection.

“I find it beautiful– it’s always outpacing me,” he says.

The Stutter is deeply entwined with his body, his mind and his emotions– and yet he can’t figure it out. He can’t grasp it.

“A time limit assumes that all people have relatively equal access to time through their speech. Which isn’t true.” He explains he can rehearse a piece as much as he wants, but he doesn’t know how much time it will actually take him to say something, until it comes time to perform.

At the NYC event, performances were limited to two to three minutes.

The first half of Ellis’s performance took around five minutes- already twice as long as the time limit. The second half consisted of just one sentence. It took him four minutes and nine seconds to get through. He notes that in practice, he was able to share his piece in just two minutes and thirty seconds. It was important to him that the piece adhere to the time limit, even if he couldn’t perform it within that limit.

That final sentence was:

“Black Feminist Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw once wrote, ‘Treating different things the same can generate as much inequality as treating the same things differently.’ “

While up on stage, working through that sentence, he wondered if he should get up and leave. There have been so many moments in his life when he stopped speaking because he didn’t want to put in the labor necessary to follow through on what he’d intended to share.

But this time, it was important to him to get through his performance. In fact, he saw it as an act of resistance.

He talked about developing a love of jazz when he was younger. How he observed his albums would maybe only have four nine-minute tracks compared with much shorter pop songs.

Those longer songs, the way he speaks– he feels there is this racialized element– a black resistance to certain structures of time.

“As a black person, I’m also thinking about the way that time and access to time is racially inflected,” he said.

A black person is often not given as much time to speak, Ellis said. And in our country, where the average life span of a black person is three and a half years less than than a white person, they are literally not given as much time to live.

Please listen to the interview. Hearing Ellis speak is obviously much more powerful than reading the recap here.

Since hearing him, I’ve been rolling around what Ellis said and how he said it in my head. Thinking about the poetry of him standing on that stage and allowing the audience to sink into the space between his words.

I find myself almost wishing that The Stutter would visit us as a nation. That we could have this break in our speech and wait for the right words to come to us.

I’m thinking also about my friend and the poetry in her research- whether she would call it that or not. How she spent time with these microscopic beings no one else thinks to offer a thought to. How because she spent time with them, they share a story with her about time and climate. And how she listened to the story and then shared it with the world.

I’m thinking about Brad’s cousin. How she has to dance. How it’s not optional. It’s not frivolous. It’s not a waste of time. It’s the thing that helps her define the shape of her life here.

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it,” Jahren writes.
“Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

As an adult, I am no longer the seed, but the oak tree. Not the possibility of the thing, but the thing waiting to die. Regardless, I feel like I have the ability to flourish even while I am dying. Even as I careen through an inconceivable, immeasurable universe on the frond of a dandelion seed. Like Horton’s Whos.

Humans thrive when we spend our days like Jahren and my friend and Brad’s cousin. Investigating, questioning and interpreting. Honoring their time here by exploring the things that sing to them. We thrive, when like Jerome Ellis, we expand our notion and understanding of time itself.

By doing this we get to live a dual existence- as both the seed and the oak, our ideas carried away on breezes to distant shores nourishing future forests we can only imagine today.