It Always Has Been A Creek Heading East
On the strange sweetness of time running out
Well, somehow another semester is almost over. After this I have just one more of being, formally, both a student and a teacher left. My skin, waistline, wallet, and marriage have all suffered considerably in a year and a half of grad school, and while it has been nice to get structured time to learn so many things and be in community with so many fine people, I will not miss the struggle when it’s over.
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in all my time teaching it’s that in settings like the one I’m in now, as the prescribed time a class has together draws to a close, some semblance of affection seems to appear where it didn’t used to be.
It’s like how my old basketball coach used to get really convivial toward the end of the season. The rest of the time we didn’t have this kind of relationship, and I didn’t often feel like a valued member of the team—on a good night, I was the twelfth man in on a fifteen man squad, and the good nights were few and far between, though I did average something like one steal per game for my whole career despite also averaging something like ninety seconds of playing time per game, which you can interpret as a function of just how badly I deserved more chances out there or just that it was Syracuse in the aughts and so we were running the 2-3 zone like every other team in the city and that formation is a scrappy undersized player’s paradise—
Anyway. I don’t mean to say that these sudden outpourings of esprit de corps weren’t genuine. Quite the opposite, and that’s what keeps drawing my attention. The way that the movement of time toward an end seems to draw people together, no matter what the rest of it was like. Hence there being a French term for it at all.
This same thing happens with my students. We all silently cross some threshold together in the last few weeks of the term, and things get easier somehow, and things seem to be forgiven, mostly. Even if each of us believes ourselves to have been on the receiving end, not the giving end, of most of the preceding weeks’ difficulties. There is simply something about endings that makes us feel companionable, even affectionate, toward the people who were with us for the beginnings and the middles. No matter how those beginnings and middles felt.
Time is always going to run out, whether we want it to or not, and so this companionability is perhaps a natural and necessary defense mechanism against the void. It’s maybe why W.S. Merwin wrote “Would I love it this way if it could last,” why Jason Isbell sang “Maybe time running out is a gift,” why Jim Harrison asked “Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?”, why D.H. Lawrence said “I yield myself and am/borrowed/By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through/the chaos of the world.”
I don’t know exactly what to do with all of these observations other than to recognize that we are entering the season where time is of a stranger shape than at any other point in the year. The light continues to diminish, as it will for another few weeks, leaving the days frighteningly short and the nights exhaustingly long. There is a frantic rush to get things done—schoolwork, last emails, elaborate meals, travel between homes each with their own complicated emotional tenor. It feels important, then, to hunker down. To let time do what it must do, to be taken by the rhythm of the season rather than fighting it uphill until the dawning of the new year. We were always meant to feel a little awed and small as things swirl around us on their way to an ending. May it draw us closer instead of breaking us apart.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
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PPS - If you’re in the mood for some holiday-specific reading, please enjoy this piece I wrote a few years ago about The Last Waltz, Thanksgiving, and our human need for traditions.
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Wishing you a peaceful end of the semester with a minimum of student crises and awful administrative catch-22s.
I just happened to see your Instagram story post about how much more relaxed you feel when you're not bombarded with constant phone notifications, and it reminded me to take a little better care of myself and my attention. (Your observations so often have this clarifying effect that I really cherish, even just little things like that.) When there is too much demanding our focus, then we don't really get any of it fully, and life can feel so scarce. And when we can see and feel the true limits of things, we find can find them so much easier to appreciate.
There are only so many people I actually can message. Who do I want them to be, and what do I want to talk to them about? When will I be able to sit down and do so appreciatively? And if this life really is as fleeting as the stiffness in my ankles is starting to tell me it's gonna be, what will I attend to while I can, and what will I not? And how can I slow myself down enough to actually be present for what I choose, rather than trying to inhabit everything, and never really be there?
I like to think that if I could live forever, I would still greedily soak up everything and never tire of it. I'm never satisfied, in that way. But of course, I do know that I'm never going to get my fill in this life, and that's probably what actually keeps me hungry.
A buddy of mine likes to say, “Time is undefeated.” But we still get three timeouts and can take it into OT if we’re lucky. It’s wild to realize your Last Waltz/Reunion Bowl post was four years ago. Firing up the DVD player soon.