“The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies.” – Edgar Allen Poe
“Hurry and love are incompatible. Hurry…is the antithesis of love.” – John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
“Tienes que dar un abrazo al colegio!” (“You have to hug the school!”) one of my now fourth-grade students hollered as he body-slammed his small self against the hallway wall. He stretched his arms out as wide as they could go and craned his neck back at me expectantly until I and another student laughed and joined him. Though his height had him staring at a concrete block, the other student and I—both a smidge taller—had a panoramic view of the classes below. There they bounced down beneath us, racing around with bellies full of juice boxes and ecstasy at this wild blessing of another year of jump rope and English journaling behind them, their last day of school. I understood my small friend’s flailing poetry: he didn’t want me to forget the school, or forget him, or forget his classmates. He remembered me. He wanted to be remembered, too.
I’m back, I thought, digging my fingers into the wall’s cavities, another way to pinch myself. Tomorrow was summer. Last year on this date, I had just returned to the U.S., frantically baking and insisting on keeping up a 10 pm dinnertime and eating absurd amounts of watermelon while trying to convince myself the whole year wasn’t just a wonderful—albeit occasionally confusing—hallucination. Lost in this memory, glued to the wall, the laughing voice of one of my lead teachers broke me out of brooding.
“As you can see, nothing has changed.”
I swiveled and grinned back at him, then stepped away from the wall and motioned for my small friend and his classmate to gallop with me down the metal stairs to join the others at recreo. I hoped this signaled to him, I remember.
But now I am back, I thought again, suddenly astonished, as I pushed open the double doors to the slam of sunshine on the patio and the scuffed knees and whatever they called four-square here that I’d already forgotten. And it looks like nothing has changed, but I have, and I’m sure they have. I flitted from pocket to pocket, feeling the horsepower of group hugs lift me straight off my feet, excited chatterings and offerings of a grape or a cookie while a phrase formed in my head, my brain trying to verify its grammar as my body ventured through the yard: es justo como fue, pero no soy como fui. Maybe the first organic thought I’d had in Spanish since the fall.
One student insisted she didn’t remember me, though I recognized a glint in her eye that told me otherwise. How is it that I remembered that glint, that saltwater taffy-like cartwheel, that Pokémon card, the orange peels always discarded in that corner, in just five minutes—53 weeks later on?
I did.
In just thirty minutes, I found a rough two-thirds of my 300 prior students, five out of six teachers, and gathered at the cafeteria across the street with three of my teachers/Spanish mothers for a café con leche. In under two hours back inside those walls, I re-lived half the school year; in two and a half days back in Logroño, I proofread and spell-checked the final weeks of last year without the stress of a job search, cultural re-transition, and looming lack of certainty about when and if I’d ever make it back (if never, I’d worried, what would I make of its meaning?). But I did. That weekend, the dénouement.
And what we did in thirty minutes! What I did in two days! Aiming to recapture the punchiest notes of an entire year in less than a week is disingenuous but so much fun (you can retrace steps but not restore feelings; that is a blog for another day)! In just one day, we hiked in a nearby region, enjoyed a leisurely coffee, taxied to a vineyard, shopped on Gran Via, finally sat down for dinner at the restaurant below our old apartment, played darts at a bar, and went dancing…
But no matter what we packed in, we still had time to spare.
Tiempo de sobra: time to spare. One of my favorite Spanish expressions that also translates to “plenty of time,” ample time, extra time, time to kill, all the time in the world, or numerous other phrasings, depending on whose translation you follow. Leftover time, in mine. It’s why sobremesa and the siesta exist, why flamenco spawns from people sitting on plastic picket chairs in the streets.
Back in Chicago, I thought I would write this post on how time seems to move slower in Spain (and much of Europe). The question that arose, when thrown immediately back into the breakneck pace of this city, of why I am always rushing around. On the nagging feeling I’d had, shoving lunch into 15 minutes this year after months of taking a good hour-plus to chew and stare out at the birds by the steeple and consider things, that my brain was starving for some sort of vitamin think…about why I am pinning up my hair and also checking my email as I cross Michigan Avenue in traffic, why the Amtrak nearly flattened me in July when I crossed while sending a voice note to a friend, why my bedtime is creeping later and later and my mornings, earlier…why I am always rushing and grasping for just one moment of slow and simple. Why I sometimes exhale and realize I’d been holding my breath for two weeks.
Sometimes I’d start to consider, but then the “L” would arrive, or an IM notification would sound, or I’d decide to carry all the bags to the alley at once, so I’d pause those thoughts right there. No more thinking through just how I could make that same sort of space now and here. Just going, carrying things and carrying on. That silly time: I never seem to have enough of it; I’m always trying to make more of it.
I’m always somewhere slippery between seven minutes late and just in the nick of time.
Returning home, this phrase tiempo de sobra took on an entirely new meaning when, within a few weeks, I caught a last-minute flight home to visit my grandfather in his assisted living home, where he is in long-term palliative care.
It’d be an understatement to tell you that, there, he has time to spare.
Each morning, he wakes up, again, to what I can only assume is a motley collection of irritation, relief, resignation, good humor, and gratitude. A laugh, another sunrise, another afternoon of scheduled activity and ice cream at 6:00 before it’s time to turn in for bed and do it again. Both a privilege and a curse, I understand. The puzzles we do, the pictures we pour over, the psalms we read, the hundreds of pages of poetry I remind him he wrote himself—I wonder, delicately, if to him they all tend to blend together: a monotonous tiempo de sobra like the mystery medley of vegetables he sheepishly leaves behind each evening in favor of requesting both of the daily desserts he’s supposed to choose between. I mean, in this case, I would choose apple pie over asparagus over and over again, too. Wouldn’t you?
What’s hit me in these last few months is the irrepressible reality that time is out of our control. Through the travels this summer; my increasing reliance on multiple means of CTA transportation in quick sequence to get where I’m trying to go; sniffling through Andrew Garfield’s and Florence Pugh’s expansive new film We Live in Time last week. All of it. We can do a lot to better manage it, make a forest of strides to make peace with it…but at different moments of the day, we are always going to feel like we need more of it, or that we have too much of it.
So what do I do with that?
To start, instead of leaving two minutes late, I started leaving one minute early.
I’ve taken the three minutes I stand waiting on the platform of the “L” to be aware, rather than annoyed. Last week, my fourth-grade students grappled with whether they imagine time as a line or a bubble (one got up to draw her theory on the whiteboard—I think they are all future philosophy majors). This week, I’m going to make it a point to call out moments of joy and jump for chances to do something silly, like sketching, or serious—like reading rather than skimming through my workplace’s newspaper out by the water in this looks-like-fall-feels-like-summer week we’ve been granted. I’m not going to tout something like, “I’m going to stop taking time for granted” because we’re imperfect people and we will take time for granted, far too frequently to feel good about. But that’s okay. If we stop and slow-motion-body-slam ourselves against this wall of reality that we don’t know just how much leftover we’ll have, if any, ever—that’s like giving life a hug, in all of its messy and every sip of its good.
I have realized this: as long as I am in a hurry, it will be impossible for life to be poetry.
With love for your patience with me as I pushed off writer's block this summer,
Ellie
Que l'éternel ne manque point de temporel,
(singulier renversement),
Que le spirituel ne manque point de charnel,
Il faut tout dire, c'est incroyable : que l'éternité ne manque point d'un temps,
Du temps, d'un certain temps.
C'est-à-dire, il faut le dire, il dépend de nous
Que le plus ne manque pas du moins,
Que l'infiniment plus ne manque pas de l'infiniment moins,
Que l'infiniment tout ne manque pas de l'infiniment rien.
– Charles Péguy, The Portico of the Mystery of the Second Virtue
“Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts... The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.” – John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
P.S. Anyone have ideas for a new name for this blog (With Love from ____? ... something else with an L? Wait, maybe it just came to me.)
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