songs of experience

Sometimes I lose whole chunks of time. I don’t know if this happens to other people (aside from those who have substance abuse related black-outs), but I can go to write in my journal … or this blog … and see that weeks or even months have passed since my last entry. I try to fill in the gaps by checking our family wall calendar (I’m tempted to write “cross check” like the flight attendants do, but I don’t really know what that means) … and I end up staring and staring at the word “Thursday” or the number “17.” I look at the blank space inside the box and strain to remember, “what happened that day?” Of course I ran, but how far? With whom? There were no doctor’s appointments written down, or meetings listed, or “notes to self” scribbled in the tiny square (my life that day)… so, what then?! I hate losing time like this. I hate living my life on automatic pilot (hey, isn’t it the live pilots who ask for the “cross-check”?). When this happens too often, I turn to my books for inspiration and reminders that I must “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Thoreau).

Today, Annie Dillard helped me remember:

“I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend? Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both. Too little noticing, though – I would risk much to avoid this – and I would miss the whole show. I would wake on my deathbed and say, “What was that?�

from, An American Childhood