I started my MFA last year at the age of 35. It wasn’t until I arrived at my first class that I realized my age. I told someone shortly after that I couldn’t believe the number, that time would have happened to me without me knowing it. How is it possible to be both aware of the years as they pass and entirely shocked by them? I’d married, travelled, had children, bought a house…and somehow, everything felt new. There was still time, and then, with the number I held between me and the world, suddenly, there wasn’t time.
When I think of time and how we use it, my mind returns to a former coworker who, when we worked nights together, told me that she could never bring herself to do much in the hours leading up to our 7 o’clock shift. By 2pm, she was paralyzed. What would time offer her in this space, what could she possibly do that was worthy? She said she often just sat and waited, watched the piles of laundry go undone.
Years later, another colleague, a video producer, had his knuckle bent so hard on the clock that he knew exactly what a minute meant more than I could imagine possible. As his assistant, I’d often tell him “there’s just no time left for it”—it being another shot, another scene. But he’d insist. After the wrap-up, I’d look at the hour, and he was always right on time. If we’d have gone by my call, we would have ended too early.
Time and narrative. Time and narrative. I can’t stop coming back to the two. Narrative—an account, a collection of moments threaded by story—must live in time because it’s human made. We all live in time. But what about our individual understandings of our days, how we use them? My internal clock was so different from my colleagues’—before my night shift, I’d often read or take long bike rides, both activities I found fulfilling. I believed there was something I could make of that time. The video producer did too, with only minutes to work with.
What is time to a person who does more and a person who does less? I’m not talking so much about what we produce, more about what we believe is possible. If narrative is the things we actively do, in a kind of order of importance we choose, how does this play out in the hours and years we have before us?
I think the interesting part about narrative is that it has layers. While my fellow night-shift worker dreaded the 7pm work hour, she maintained some inner workings leading up to it: thoughts, feelings, sensations, however uncomfortable some of them were. Perhaps these were the same things I felt when pushing up against the final moment of long set days. Neither of us believed in the time we had, but it still affected our narratives.
We like to believe that time is linear. It’s something we have to work with, that we can control it and we know where it lives and where it is going. But the things that preoccupy us—how we sit in the world, move through it, think within it—are strongly related to what time means to us, not just that it is. We can choose to build a narrative that is filled with action, that uses up every ounce of time and energy we have. Or we can split off and just…exist, stand in front of a body of water and think.
One way or another, I’m not sure I would have applied to go back to school if I believed I was too old to do it. That time wasn’t on my side. If I had done something else, who knows what time would have meant to me. Now, I wake up at 36, very aware of it and my ageing. And sometimes I still forget, so I can move forward without concern about what I’m doing.
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