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It’s been five months since I left the Appalachian Trail, two months since I moved out of my parents’ house, and a month since I started an internship at a branding company. 150 days.

That’s a long time, when you really stop to think about it…150 consecutive 24-hour periods. Mind-blowing, really. But who’s got time to think about time when twenty-five cents only buys you twenty minutes on a parking meter? And more importantly, who wants to? Think about time, I mean.

It just goes and goes and goes. And you can’t seem to touch it, move it, change it. But it can do all these things to you.

You can’t swallow the ocean, but the ocean can swallow you, right?

If I were confident I’d hazard a guess that 99% of us are gonna be dead and buried at some point. Seems like clear natural law to me. The other 1% (and they are “other”) have got the issue all sorted out and are keeping the answer to eternal life under wraps. They’re ahead of the curve. You see, they stumbled on the modern day elixir of life, panacea of all ailments, the holy grail of infomercial products…

….a little medical magic called botox. Forget music, memories, and happiness, botox is the only thing guaranteed to keep your soul wrinkle free.

Heh.

Anyway back to time.

I’ve spent the past 150 days trying to learn how not waste it. And I come to a similar answer each time I reflect, but the logic tends to be circular and hard to grasp and even harder to swallow. That said, it has very real medicinal properties (which is no surprise considering that, nearly by definition, medicine is hard to swallow…spoonful of sugar and all that).

So I’ll put what I’ve gleaned to you as poem, because that’s the closest method people have got to writing an understanding.

[And if you’re religious in any sense, don’t laugh when I talk about the power of poetry. If you believe the Bible or the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or Yeats or Keats or your neighbor’s tall tale about the whale he caught on fifteen pound test that one time off the Alaskan shore or the epitaphs on your grandparent’s graves…well, then you’re already caught in a poetic web.]

So, now that you’ve realized you live in a world shaped by the poetry of symbols, here’s another for you.

About time.
—————————————————————————————————————

First, a baby is born.
Second, the baby is given a name.
Third, the baby gets an unruly mane of brown hair.
Fourth, the baby gets a job.

Fifth, the baby retires from that job.
Sixth, the baby loses that unruly mane of, now white, hair.
Seventh, the baby forgets that name. Was it Susan? Sarah?
Eighth, the baby is taken away. Put in the ground.

So it goes.

As a reader you’re confused now,
when you shouldn’t be,
because the baby is you.
It’s only a small thing,
the distance between first steps
and last steps.

From the very first, you’ve been on a pilgrimage,
towards something holy and far away and
getting closer each day.
Cradle to grave. Isn’t that what people say?

You’ve wondered
about this
idea.
You wonder about it as you get up
most mornings, eat breakfast, make talk with your wife,
start your car, get stuck in traffic, file papers,
get home, make love, go to sleep,
forget this idea so that you can close your eyes,
remember it so you can open them.

Still it’s there, in the morning, hanging like a loose thread from
a sweater, itching to be pulled.

Who would make you live so that you could die?

And one winter night you’re walking through a park and there’s this homeless guy huffing into his hands, trying to bring them back to life — in that moment you understand.

Who would give life, only to take away? Someone who knows that two cold, empty hands rubbed together make warm things.

Do you understand?