Time Isn’t Real, But the Stars Are

It’s back-to-school time, and for the first time in what may be nearly fifty years, I feel something in my nervous system beginning to unravel.

I myself spent twenty-plus years inside the rhythm of school. Then I had a daughter and we entered the whole damn cycle again. Summer break, back to school, first day, last day, vacations squeezed into whatever space the calendar allowed. Year after year, that same emotional whiplash between freedom and responsibility. Add it all together and I’ve spent nearly fifty years living inside a rhythm I never consciously chose.

And fuck, maybe that’s what I’m actually noticing.

Time isn’t real, but the stars are. The seasons are. The earth is still moving in relationship with the sun, whether Target has Christmas decorations put out or not. Somewhere along the way, time was laid upon us and we all just somehow accepted it.

Ummm, no thank you.

We have false systems placed upon time and then began treating those systems as though they are time itself.

School boards dictate the seasons. Consumer calendars tell us what comes next. Work weeks, semesters, holidays, summer vacations, fiscal years, all these tidy little systems laid over something far more mysterious and alive. Then, somehow, we began to believe them. We let them tell us where we are and what this moment is supposed to mean.

But it’s not natural, baby.

It’s not necessarily true time, nor is it harmonic with the natural rhythms we recognize in our own bodies. Nature has her own movements. Light changes. Heat rises and falls. Things bloom, ripen, and shed. Our bodies move too, responding to light and temperature, energy and season, something asking for expansion and sometimes asking for retreat.

Somewhere along the way, we placed another system over all of that.

Time has been hijacked. Or perhaps more accurately, our relationship with time has been hijacked.

We’ve allowed our systems to usurp our nature.

When you’re inside of it, of course, it seems normal. This is simply the rhythm of life. Summer arrives and you squeeze in as much freedom, pleasure, delight, swimming, and sunshine, as you can possibility muster, because somewhere in the background you already know the clock is ticking. Then August arrives and the whole machinery begins tightening around you again. Buy the supplies. Meet the teachers. Get organized. Get serious.

Real life is about to begin again.

Except this year, my daughter isn’t in school. And something wild is happening.

I don’t feel the grief. I don’t feel like summer is running out. I don’t feel like I have to squeeze every last drop of pleasure from it before somebody rings a bell and tells me to go back inside. I’m opting the fuck out.

One summer, years ago, I was at the pool on that final day before it closed for the season. I was genuinely devastated. My whole body in disbelief. I cried, mourning this last sunny day basking by the water, knowing summer was coming to an end.

My husband at the time mocked me for being so melodramatic about it.

And fair enough, from the outside it probably did look a little ridiculous. Woman weeps because neighborhood pool closes. Somebody alert the authorities.

But I can see it differently now.

That grief wasn’t only for the last sunny day or the water or the joy of of lying in the heat with nowhere else I needed to be. Somewhere underneath it was my unacknowledged acceptance of a false system placed upon me. Summer was over because I had been told summer was over. My body rejecting an ending, a closing, a return to a part of life that I was somehow being told was real.

And that may be one of the strangest agreements we have all made without really noticing we made it.

My body accepted a directive about time so thoroughly that I could sit beside a swimming pool, under a summer sun, and grieve the end of summer while I was still physically living inside it.

There is this unconscious program built into the school calendar that somehow the months of frolicking are the exception and the return to structure is reality.

Summer is where we play.

Then real starts again.

Baby, summer is not even over.

The fall equinox does not arrive until September. The earth has not looked at the calendar and decided it is time to sharpen its pencils. The trees have not received their school schedules and locker assignments. Cause god, what’s school?!?

And yet somehow, culturally, we have been convinced that summer ends in early to mid-August.

This is the reality we haven’t only been sold, but that we’ve somehow all collectively consented to. Year after year, generation after generation, we arrange our lives around it until the rhythm no longer feels imposed. It simply feels true.

The body learns it too.

August means transition. August means contraction. August means get ready.

Except none of those things are inherently true about August.

It’s covert programming.

And maybe what I’m feeling this year is my body finally realizing it doesn’t have to follow them. I’m not complying.

School is only one layer of this bizarre relationship we have with time.

Walk into almost any big box store right now and you can feel the next season already reaching for you.

Back-to-school supplies fill the aisles while summer is still blazing outside. Halloween decorations begin creeping onto the shelves. Christmas somehow isn’t far behind. Even while I’m barefoot and damp with sweat, apparently I should be considering December.

What?

It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect reflection of the way we are constantly being psychologically pulled away from the present.

It doesn’t allow us to be here.

And it isn’t even particularly subtle. It’s an enforced program telling us we need to be thinking about, preparing for, buying for what comes next. We haven’t finished basking in one season before we’re being instructed to anticipate another.

I’m standing in the dog days of summer and somehow being invited to think about Christmas.

Nope.

Because this consumer calendar doesn’t merely organize merchandise. It organizes our attention. It invites us to psychologically relocate into a future that hasn’t arrived yet. Where conveniently, there’s always something else to purchase, prepare, accomplish, or get ready for.

How much of our inability to present simply where we are
has been trained into us through this constant insistence upon the next thing?

The next school year. The next holiday. The next purchase. The next trip. Ugh. The next version of life we’re apparently supposed to be preparing for while this one is still warm in our hands.

We’re somehow sold that life is hard, suck it up, put your head down, and allow the hope of what’s next to be the only morsel of joy you’re afforded. When the trip finally arrives, we cram as much “fun” into it as we possibly can while silently dreading its ending.

Then it’s back to real life, back to work, back to planning for the next sanctioned opportunity for joy. It’s truly insane.

Whose time are we participating in?

And how the hell did we all agree to this absurdity?

Last summer, still dictated by a school calendar, we went to Ireland.

I love Ireland. I’ll always love Ireland. But Ireland is rainy and muggy enough without adding peak-season crowds to the whole damn thing. And by God, the summer crowds were intolerable to me.

All of us squeezing through overcrowded streets, sitting in overcrowded restaurants, standing like idiots staring at the same sights at the same time.

Why the hell are we traveling at such a time?

Because everyone else is here too.

Families are here because the kids are out of school. Everyone is funneling their trips into the same tiny window because this is when we have collectively agreed freedom is available.

So we stand in lines together. Crowd into museums together. Navigating around all of the family necessities that come with moving humans across countries because somehow we have all been handed the same few weeks in which life is supposed to expand.

Give me Ireland in mid-October.

Give me the quieter museums and the sites after the crowds have thinned. Give me room to wander without feeling like I am moving through somebody else’s schedule. Let me encounter a place in its own natural rhythm instead of arriving because a calendar told me when I was allowed to travel.

That possibility feels delicious to me now.

Because the school calendar didn’t only dictate when my daughter “learned.” It dictated when we rested, when we traveled, when we played, when we were free. It dictated time itself, or at least the version of time I had to organize myself around for so damn long.

It’s August here in Colorado and we’ve finally had a couple of reprieves from the crushing summer heat. Our fires are still blazing, making for magnificent skies and yet so much suffering at the same time. Nature is never the sanitized little postcard we sometimes want it to be. She’s alive in all of it.

And life is still laughing.

The hummingbirds flutter by. The rabbits continue hopping through the yard entirely unconcerned with school supplies. The crickets sing. My blowup pool still sits luxuriously in the grass inviting summer to continue its rhythm.

Nothing out there appears to believe we’ve crossed some arbitrary threshold into seriousness.

Nature is still in her rhythm.

And I’m noticing in my body the stark difference between a rhythm that belongs to nature and life, and the one we’ve somehow quietly succumbed to.

One allows me to be where I am.

The other is constantly whispering that I should be somewhere else.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling without entirely having the words for it.

Natural time doesn’t seem to hurry me away from myself. It simply moves, each thing arriving in relationship with what came before it, each season allowed to be fully itself until another actually begins to emerge.

There’s an ease in that. An honesty my body can relax into.

Indeed, I went camping for the first time this summer at the beginning of August.

At precisely the moment so many people were scurrying around buying supplies, meeting teachers, arranging car-pools, and preparing their kids to head back into their little boxes that feign education, I headed into the woods.

And I had to laugh.

Get those kids back in school and out of my campgrounds. My summer is just getting started.

There was no countdown underneath that weekend. No sense that I needed to hurry up and enjoy myself before freedom closed for the season.

Just August.

And the most glorious realization that I wasn’t running out of anything.

Maybe that’s what my nervous system is celebrating most.

For the first time in nearly fifty years, there’s no invisible bell ringing in the distance, telling me what this part of the year is supposed to mean, and demanding that real life is present somewhere beyond this right now.

I could be mad about all of this.

I could rage against the system, the calendar, the school year, the retail aisles full of Christmas decorations.

But that’s not really my way.

What I’m finding instead is a total body reset.

I’m relaxed.

I can find my way back into a rhythm that is true— true to nature, true to my body, true to life actually unfolding around me.

I can say fuck the system and simply stop participating in its arbitrary falsehoods of time and timelines.

I do not consent.

I am not playing along with your games anymore.

I’m going to listen to nature. To the crickets and the birds. To the heat still rising from the earth. To the hummingbirds buzzing past me.

I’m going to stay right here in the present.

I refuse to be psychologically bullied away from my now.

Maybe that is the greater absurdity I’m finally seeing.

We’ve agreed to participate in a version of time that continually asks us to leave the moment we’re actually living, and then wondered why presence feels so difficult.

But if time itself is far stranger and more fluid than the little boxes we’ve built around it, then maybe I don’t need to keep obeying every instruction about where I am supposed to be fit of it.

The earth knows where she is. My body knows where she is.

And right now, summer is still here. So I am going to be here with her. Barefoot. Sweating. Pool waiting in the yard.

And when autumn finally arrives, I’ll meet her then.