I’m surrounded by important markers in time.
The end of last week, my husband and I took off for the coast to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the day we first met (why yes, our relationship is old enough to have its own Saturn return). It was also the celebration of the end of my treatments (last one on Thursday).
This week is the anniversary of the last day I spent working in the office. We had a meeting to discuss how to support the teams through remote work. I’ve only been in, briefly, three times in the past year (to collect equipment or get in-person IT support).
Next week is the anniversary of the lockdown here in the US Pacific Northwest. It’s also a year since I pulled a rib and then subsequently discovered a weird lump. It’s also the anniversary of the aborted visit to my parents (who I still haven’t seen). After that there will be a string off anniversaries (moving into our new house, getting officially diagnosed, etc.).
The Jungian and I discussed this at length yesterday. How it’s important to either celebrate, acknowledge, or mourn these kinds of things. That it’s important for giving us a sense of time’s cyclical nature as well as the more linear experience of our passage through it. Because on the one hand, each spring is part of the same spring. On the other, each spring will be marked with these lifetime experiences (the springs before I met my husband and the ones after, the springs before I had cancer vs. the ones after).
Traditions. Remembrances. Anniversaries. How good are you at those things?
My extended family wasn’t ever very good at them. My parents never celebrated their wedding anniversary, they didn’t do birthdays as adults, they weren’t into Mother’s Day or Valentines. Now, I appreciate that our whole society kind of sucks at this stuff. On the one hand, we have religious observances, which apply only to some of the people in our diverse culture and are therefore — and probably rightly — increasingly banished from the public sphere. On the other hand, we commercialize everything to the degree that things become distasteful (Christmas is probably the best example of this — if you can’t banish it, buy it!).
My little immediate family may have done a bit better (we celebrate our birthdays with feasts and treats, we celebrate the passage of the seasons, we celebrate our anniversary, we celebrate our friends) but it’s still a challenge for me to take time out to acknowledge the passage of time. I have to be deliberate about it. It’s one of the reasons I started doing the monthly planner and created the Lunation Rite.
Until she was imprisoned in a care home during her last months due to Covid, my husband’s grandmother went to church every single Sunday. One of her daughters took her to mass each week. Afterward family members (whether devout or not) would come visit. She had that rhythm and tradition through her whole life. So even when she was in her late 90s, long retired, and living alone, she had this regular weekly marker. She knew her position in time, both on a weekly level (it was Sunday and it will again be Sunday) but also a yearly one (advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, etc.). The liturgical calendar of the Catholics is an ACTIVE one and you can mark your position in time using it in an active way. My parents, also very elderly and retired, don’t have these markers and I feel like they have been losing their grip on time in the past few years. All days are the one day and all days are the same. I appreciate that someday that will be literally true (for all of us as we will all someday pass from this life) but in the mean time I’m not sure it’s healthy for them.
The sense of both time’s rhythms and life’s passage are important. That’s what you get when you garden. It’s what I noticed living in Minnesota as well. People would mark the coming of winter, not just with harvest fairs and Christmas lights, but also snow tires and storm windows and storing the patio furniture. Having grown up in New Mexico, where the seasons aren’t quite so obviously Middle Earth / Norman Rockwell, I didn’t have as much of a sense of this sort of thing.
Once upon a time, you could count the year through not just your experience, but that of your ancestors and descendants — back and forth in time past the span of one single life. Once upon a time, the harvest was an important benchmark and the winter a regular danger. As with so much of the modern world, I’m not sure our psyches have evolved as fast as our technologies. It leaves us feeling adrift and without temporal context. The context comes through both individual markers of time and social ones (connections between people, social traditions, etc.). We experience time through the change of the year, but also through the experiences of those we love.
This has become especially apparent during this past year. Many people, even those fortunate enough to be able to continue working, have lost their context. Students in particular have. As my kid said of virtual college — all the Zoom classes just smear together into one indistinguishable blob. We are isolated from people and also from time’s procession.
This collision of anniversaries in my life is challenging. How will I mark the anniversary of when I got sick? I don’t want to celebrate and I don’t need to mourn. How will I deal with the changes in my family ahead of me (kid going off to college, parents dying)? It’s all feeling a bit much.
But it’s also served to root me firmly back in time. And for that, I’m extremely grateful.
