Time rolls on

Generations: the compote belonged to my Great-Grandma Sieving, the music cabinet to Grandma Gotsch, and the mirror to my parents. The placemat was woven by me in 2024; the smart thermostat was installed in 2023. 

I started this post on the morning of January 1, 2025T. Think of it as The Day After 2024. Rolling up a digit at the far side of the date didn't make the day feel much different; time didn't move faster or more slowly in the previous evening's climb toward midnight. Nor did it move any faster on the downhill slide into the early hours of the new year. 

Time, it is reported, was different before people had clocks and watches and computers and phones to synchronize and measure it. Before the railroads had to run on time. "There was evening and there was morning, the first day," says the creation story in Genesis 1, with no numbers pinning down the exact time of sunrise and sunset. The new day began, as the Jewish sabbath still does, in the evening, at the end of a day's work. Long hours of daylight in summer were for planting and harvesting; long, cold winter nights were a test of endurance, or a time to seek comfort in one another. 

Measured or not, time rolls on in cycles of day and night, tides, seasons, patterns of growth and decay. The year 2025 CE looked like a faraway number when I was a child in school in the 1960s, but the intervening decades are like nothing in the context of geologic time or the existence of the universe. (The number 2025 is, however, kind of cool when you factor it -- it's the product of squares: 5 x 5 x 9 x 9.)

One of the books I read in 2024 was "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals," by Oliver Burkeman. A podcast or newspaper article prompted me to search for the book in the online catalog of my local library. It was a worthwhile read. It leaned into philosophy, reflections on what time is and how we perceive it. Burkeman, someone who writes about productivity, found that this understanding of time and its limits helped him let go of the need to corral and optimize it. There's a healthy dose of Stoicism in the book, Stoicism being a different thing as a philosophical practice of virtue and acceptance than it is in lowercase where the word suggests enduring pain or hardship with gritted teeth and no outward complaining. 

The 4,000 weeks in Burkeman's title are the span of an average lifetime. Do the math and it works out to approximately 77 years. Life has limits imposed by time and mortality. I liked the part where Burkeman quoted the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawapa: "Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities." I'll keep this in mind in the future when weeding out my collection of books, yarn, and quilting fabric, my personal accumulations of possibilities. 

Burkeman is a popular podcast guest with a website and a new book. One podcast description says that "Four Thousand Weeks" subverts the self-help genre. It's also an antidote to New Year's resolutions. So is this Calvin and Hobbes panel that my sister posted on her Facebook page. 

See those footsteps in the snow? They're a measure of time passing by. 

The year that just ended held many time-inflected marks in our national life: a once-in-every-four-years presidential election; a U. S. president realizing (albeit slowly) he was too old to hold the office for another four years; another U. S. president, Jimmy Carter, dying after reaching 100 years of age, an allotment of far more than 4,000 weeks which he used to accomplish a prodigious amount of good things.

In my life and my family's life, 2024 included the death of my mother, Marilyn Gotsch, at age 92, the last of her generation on her side of the family and my father's. At her funeral we filled a table with memories of her life which included a partially used ration book from World War II, wedding photos from the early 1950s, and pictures of her with that awful perm she had somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. In writing her obituary I broke her long life down into chapters — childhood, marriage and children, working, widowhood, grandchildren, old age. Each had its time and tasks.

Her passing has left me, the dutiful eldest daughter, conscious that I am now the oldest person at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. But I'm not sitting in a rocking chair letting people come to me for  hugs or nuggets of wisdom. Nope. I'm still cooking, clearing, putting away leftovers, and helping with the dishes. But also, at age 70, feeling the effects of time. 

I don't mean achy hips or gimpy knees -- my joints, thankfully, are doing okay. But I do find myself wondering at all that a lifetime -- 3,663 weeks to date -- contains. I see some of this just by looking around my home. Photos taken 60 years ago and scanned into my computer in 2020 appear as a screen saver on my living room TV any time I hit pause and go to the bathroom. Other memories from the past emanate from lamps, dishes, furniture, framed pictures that were once part of my parents' household and have emigrated to mine. They come with stories: the prints that hang above my sofa were purchased by my father on the day I was born. The red glass bowl currently holding red and green Hershey Kisses was my mother's. There's a teapot from one great-grandmother and a crystal compote from another; Aunt Clara told me once that her mother served fruit from this not-very-generous vessel. I knit and sew in the same rooms my kids once littered with Legos and Matchbox cars. The Christmas tree stands in the bay window where Christmas trees have stood for all of the 38 years I've celebrated Christmas in this house. I'm pretty Christmas trees stood there long before I came into the picture; the house was built in 1940. 

Looking back also measures the sorrows of a lifetime. Failings and failures, disappointments and losses from every era. Grief persists. And it's not unwelcome. 

Still, at the beginning of a new year, one tries to look at the bright side, though counter-balancing sadness with joy is not easy these days. Time's ever-rolling stream carried a lot of detritus from 2024 into 2025: war, political polarization, lies, disinformation, uncertainty. Some kinds of changes are filled with hope, others not so much. 

The Stoics would say that hard times are to be expected in life and accepting this is the key to contentment. It's a way to keep on living, and not a bad one as January days lengthen and the work of 2025 begins.