I am writing this morning because I do not have time to write.
Or, rather, there is a part of me who is *claiming* I do not have time to write. She is also claiming I have nothing to say. She is claiming that I…oh wait, she just disappeared behind a post…don’t worry…she’ll circle back.
Who is this Part of Me, you ask? Well, so far as I can tell, she’s a very fit, caffeinated woman who greets me each morning in a sweatsuit, swinging a whistle. She’s already run nineteen laps around the track in my mind before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. As she jogs, she shouts items off her clipboarded list.
“You’ve got to do that paperwork you’ve been putting off! OMG Fifteen research papers to grade?! FIFTEEN? How many squats have you done this morning? None? Fit that in at lunch, why don’t you! While you eat lunch, you can squat! Why haven’t you made a list? Have you seen your emaaaaaailllllll???”
This woman’s primary mode of interacting with the world is barely-restrained panic. The sky is generally falling and can only be held up by frantically-constructed support beams composed of Completed Tasks. Unfortunately, the tasks themselves are ALSO teetering dangerously, threatening to bury us beneath their formidable weight.
If I let her, she’ll run us all to death before 9am. Sometimes, I try shouting at her from the bleachers: “Hey! HEY! We’ve never died before, have we? Doesn’t everything always get done?” But this seems to throw her into more of a tailspin. It’s kind of like when you watch a dad tossing his toddler in the air while mom yells at him that the kid is going to hit the ceiling. His grinning, “I’ve never concussed him before” nonsense is not a comfort.
So this morning, I thought I’d write. I thought I’d write about how the days are gliding by, one after another, each one like a bit of colored glass held up to the light. Peer at it this way and there is the endless, illimitable now of a blood-red sunset whose burning you can sink into and lose yourself in.
Peer at it that way and there rises a writhing mountain of things you haven’t done, like snakes that must be wrestled to submission.
Peer at it yet another way, and it is spinning away, this Thursday falling gently on the pile of last Thursday and the Thursday before last and the Thursday when you were seventeen standing in a field in Iowa wondering if you’d live there some day.
You did not live there some day.
The spinning days took you other ways, each one coming and going, passing through you as though they were light and you were colored glass, illuminated, made to glow by all those days you could not hold.
The woman, running, still, is coming towards me. The light of the sunrise behind her casts her shadow out long and thin. She, like me, is running into shadow.
So this morning, let her go. Let me stop here on the track in the middle of the race. Let me stop and write and let my writing be — what? Oh, yes. That. A momentary turn — a turn away from shadow and towards the light which, though coming now, will soon go. Let me not say I did not watch it burn.
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