Causing time to echo

Life has a way of repeating itself as it tells its story. I recently hung out with a friend from college for the first time since last summer, and we talked about how our lives have grown closer or further apart throughout the years: I moved abroad and returned, he moved out of the city, we were roommates for a while, I moved back to the city, he moved out of state and then came back, etc. It’s a really special thing to be friends with someone for long enough that you’ve seen multiple versions of each other and are still able to enjoy time together. Catching up this time felt like a reprise of all the other times we’d seen each other after months away and been excited to share all our news.

The feeling this gave me was a little different than nostalgia or reminiscing on the past. It felt much more to me like hearing a variation on a theme – something that has happened before, but now the melody has been set to a new harmonic progression, or the emphasis has changed, or the scene is happening during golden hour instead of late morning. I really like those moments where it feels that even though you’re experiencing a scene in the present, a similar scene from another time is superimposed onto it as well. To me it makes time feel like a sort of helix rather than a straight line, or like it’s echoing back on itself. I want to try to savor lots of beautiful echoes of time and find a way to soften difficult or painful echoes of time.

This idea of having many similar experiences playing over each other has been on my mind a lot lately, because I’ve been reading Sheila Heti’s book Alphabetical Diaries. She took about a decade’s worth of her personal diary entries, put them in a spreadsheet, alphabetized them by sentence, and then spent another couple years trimming it down to something very unlike any other book I’ve read. It’s very rare that any two sentences in a row are describing events from the same day or month; time is completely flattened, as if ten years of thoughts and events and emotions were exposed onto a single frame of film. Sometimes she’ll seem to repeat or contradict herself, or it’ll be unclear which of her previous partners she’s referring to, or the reader ends up subconsciously creating a narrative where there really isn’t one. I’ve realized while reading it that that’s similar to how I feel when I think about my own longterm friendships or lifelong struggles – not as a chronological story, but as a thousand moments from the past and present all happening at once, or else happening on a sort of cycle.

This year I’ve been volunteering every other week at a bird sanctuary, which is sort of like a small forest preserve by Lake Michigan. There are trails around the perimeter which are open to the public, as well as a larger, more secluded fenced-off portion. I mainly help clear away invasive plants to support local biodiversity. The volunteers there also do phenological monitoring of when certain birds migrate, and talk to each other about whether this plant or that flower is blooming early or late. It’s really interesting to see how older people talk about the seasons when they’ve watched the same progression happen over and over and over, and hear what they notice each time.

I’m finding a lot of peace in these kinds of natural cycles where each year tells a similar story. I think it’s a good contrast to the “constant growth” mindset that we see in lots of areas of society. Businesses must earn more money each year or they’ll die; online platforms are tuned to promote whatever content is most striking, most extreme, most enraging, most frightening; computational power and storage capacity must increase exponentially. All sorts of areas in modern life demand movement up and to the right, so any style of living that only maintains itself without a need for growth seems like a conscious (and maybe rebellious) choice. But that’s a topic for another day 🙃.

For now I’m trying to consciously notice these types of moments where life presents a variation on a theme. I’m not interested in recreating a previous scene line-for-line, but I want to bend the curve of time back on itself every now and then to force an overlap, and cause time to echo. Every time this spring that the sun has come out and shined in my window I’ve tried to reach back in my mind to all the previous years when I’ve felt lighter after winter ends. Or when I go to a certain neighborhood or restaurant, I make an active effort to tie the present moment to another time I was there, so that the memories are linked together. That has made my day-to-day life feel richer and more layered even if nothing too special is happening. That’s how I’m savoring all these moments.