The Leaves Are Changing, the Clock Is Ticking

Night Thoughts On Wasted Time

Leila McConnell Collage No. 174, 5/82.

One night recently – or rather morning, early, in the wee hours – you know, one of those nights when you’re lying in bed wide awake at one or two or three, determined NOT to look at your phone because the screen light will condemn you to another two hours of lost, much needed sleep – lying there with various parts aching one after another – or sometimes coming together in a symphony of ache – and various worries looming one after another – or sometimes coming together in a panic attack of worry – (You’re thinking, I know, as I am: “What a hot-house flower. And he hasn’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet, like death and dying, or preventing nuclear decimation.”). 

On one of those nights – these lines, a sort of poem, spewed out of my restless brain, onto the note pad I keep at bedside, the better to capture the always profound night thoughts that loom at such hours, to capture them before they dissolve into the gloomy dark lonely post-midnight ether from which they can never be recovered in morning light:

Oh, to be at the beginning
Instead of near the end.
What wonders I could accomplish,
Had I but time enough ahead!

But I was there once - 
It seems so long ago - 
And What? Did I waste it all?

Oh to have known then
How short my time would seem.

Were it not now almost gone by
What wonders I'd have accomplished,
If I'd known NOWS then.

I know some of this doesn’t make any sense. “known NOWS then?” What can that possibly mean? This is partly due to my inability to decipher even my own midnight scrawlings. I did the best I could, in the light of day, but  I’ll keep working on it, and update as needed. 

But I think you’ll get the idea even so: Wow, what qualms I have NOW about frittering my life away doing mundane things like making a living and living day-to-day. Oh, yes, and excusing and procrastinating. I knew even THEN that wasn’t the way things get accomplished.

Some of you may know that I am an admirer of an artist named Emma Richardson Cherry (1859-1954), a Houston woman who accomplished many things in her long life, not the least, painting hundreds of paintings, many of them beautiful and interesting. And also writing hundreds of letters, which have been preserved and which I have read. 

One of the most moving passages in her letters – moving to me today, anyway, because it relates to my present topic – is this, written from Sicily, where she’d gone in the winter of 1910 to renew herself as an artist, at about mid-life and mid-career for her, written to her husband back in Houston:

"Thought at first my spring was dried up. I had such a time getting into working shape – so long doing nothing much makes one so rusty. When I come home I must have a studio fixed up & really do something regularly – or give it up entirely – as I can’t hold my grasp if I let go so long again."

When she wrote the lines, at mid-life and mid-career, she still had 40 years, and some of her major accomplishments, ahead – even though she’d already been instrumental in founding art museums in Kansas City, Denver, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio; had a family; started many other artists on their way – not to mention producing half those hundreds of paintings and letters referred to earlier. And I, long past mid-life, and without career (there were jobs, of course, but nothing I’d term career), what have I accomplished? 

I read somewhere that the life expectancy for an average white American male (that’s me) is 75.3 years. 

… !!! 

Does it really give me comfort that I’m already beating those odds? Remember back when we used to remind ourselves, with a sardonic chuckle, that Mozart was dead when he was our age? Now it would be when he was half our age - even less than half. Of course we could take the tack: Aren't we lucky that we've lived twice as long as Mozart? But that's somehow not near as pithy, never the spin we give. 

But no! I know nothing good ever comes from such comparisons. We each accomplish what we can, when the time is right. For everything there is a season, and my season may still come. Though they will not be my salad days, when my season comes, it’s no use trying to force such things, and no good comparing to others. (Though even with such wisdom in my mind, the term “diddly-squat” latches onto my fragile ego like a ravenous piranha and won’t let go.)

Some days I feel like I'm just marking time till the end - and I'm not talking about the end of the day. Puts me in mind of what it used to be like as a kid, those interminable waits till Christmas and summer; or later, when the hormones raged, wishing the hours away till disco time. Nothing seemed more  pressing, and more certain to fill whatever void there was – and there always was a void.

We may not be altogether unjustified if we lament that the fates conspire against us. This was to have been a week of uninterrupted work for me, during which I’d write the second chapter of my Great American Novel. I wrote the first chapter some decades ago, as a graduate student, idling away hours that should have been devoted to study (lost hours that ultimately resulted in a lost fellowship). I rediscovered that first chapter recently as I flipped through great stacks of dusty manuscripts from my past. Reading it again, I saw instantly how great it was destined to be. So this week was to see Chapter 2. And then a nasty cold hit. What else could I do but take to my bed, drink lots of liquids, and bemoan (between the moans) what an unfair thing life is.

To end on a positive note, instead of my usual glum: Thank goodness I didn’t write that second chapter fifty years ago, as soon as I’d finished the first. In my youth and inexperience, I’d likely have messed it up. Now at least there’s a chance (a chance!) it still may one day bloom forth in its destined wisdom and glory – if I live to be ten times Mozart’s age.

And now for the true ending, the glum one you knew would come: The leaves are changing, the clock is ticking. In almost no time it will be over. I ask myself what I’ll have to show for it in the end? 

But no matter how much we’d like to convince ourselves there’s something bigger, more meaningful (whatever that means) going on, no matter what we’ve done or are doing, the truth may be it won’t make much difference then. (If only this had been a scrawling I wasn’t able to decipher in the light!)