There simply isn’t enough time to live

The feeling that the present is always already gone

I don’t mean that life is too short.  I mean that every moment, each goddamn one of them is just too short.  Every second is pregnant.  Do we notice?  Do we care?

Does our cultural obsession with entertainment, being entertained, act as a drug to the essence of being?  And how might we taste it?

My life has been characterized by a mad rush.  For everything.  It isn’t the same as being in a hurry.  I love that Moroccan expression, “if you are in a hurry you are already dead.”

No.  I am not in a hurry.  At least hardly ever.  There are few things that I dislike more than the feeling that I am late, or that I have to hurry.  What’s the difference I am driving at?  By being in a rush I mean something different.  I mean trying to stuff in as much as possible into every darn moment.  Like stuffing your pockets until they are full, and then hanging things from your belt, and then putting on a rucksack, and adding hanging things to that, and then filling your arms…not to miss anything.

There is a physical manifestation in my house.  Unfinished projects.  I start.  Then I take a break.  Then I get distracted.  That’s why my house is divided by themes, and why I need three offices.  It drives my children crazy.  Not.  They think its quirky and fun, and maybe begin to understand it.

By organizing my physical space around states of being, I am able to keep things more or less on track.  The stone stairs up and down are a kind of in/out tray, and every trip means moving things to their right places.  And having rooms by theme means that even in chaos, it is easy to find things.  I always know where it is…at least until my children move things around.

What I am also saying about “rushing” is this profound need that I have, maybe even an ache, to not be irrelevant.  To not disappear.  To not pass through life as a passenger, a bystander.  I don’t mean to be important, but I do mean to be relevant.  I blog for my mental health.  I also blog because it makes me feel less invisible.  It’s a form of filling my pockets.  Making every trip count.

As we round out the year it is inevitable that I think back about what I have done, what I have not done.  I will write a dedicated post on this topic, and on what I look forward to in the coming year.  But I find myself overcome with emotion.  And a powerful wistfulness of things that I am not, have not been, have not done.  This is strange for me, as I have never been one to live with regret.

Indeed, one of my mantras has always been to never do something which one might come to regret.  That takes the elimination of all self-destructive behaviour.  It was my incentive for not killing myself as a 20-year-old.  Does that make sense?  It has become one of my leading lights.

And I can safely say that I have lived a life without regret.  Even the most powerful potential source of regret—being trans and not coming out young, is not even a blip on the radar.  Why not?

Because I trust myself enough to know that I made the best decision I was capable of at the time, for me, and based on what I knew.

You can only live that way if you do not have any self-destructive strains.  Getting rid of mine was the core of the psychotherapy which dominated my life from the ages of 20-22.  My life took off in response.  It was an inflection point.

I went from someone who never managed to date the right girl to someone in a long-term relationship with an incredible woman.  She was merciful but also a queen of tough love.  In today’s world, were we dating and enlightened, I suspect we would have fallen into a form of FLR.  She set high standards, and living up to those was a profoundly growing and pleasing experience for me.  It broke my heart to leave her, but life intervened.  I’ve never cried over someone like that.  And do you know what she said?

“It’s always harder for the one who leaves.”  I don’t think she had ever been left before.  Sadly, she came to hate me and refused any later contact.

She came once to see me.  We said our goodbyes in Paris, and despite the magic of the city, barely left our hotel.  I saw her once again, a year later, just quickly, at an art opening—she was a painter (and still is), and she was wearing my favourite jacket…I was wondering where it had gone.  What did I say?

“You look beautiful in my coat.”

“Don’t you think.”

I found myself thinking about her because I chanced upon a recent photo of her (we have mutual if distant connections) and she still looks as fabulous as ever.  She is a Scorpio.  Once they bite, they won’t ever stop.  It is weird though, as I have settled randomly about 10 minutes drive from her ancestral home.

I was sitting in a bar in Mexico, and in the most random sequence of coincidences, the one other person sitting at the bar, and who was there by complete happenstance, asked me if I knew her after just three questions.

“Where’d you go to school?”

“X”

“Did you know X?”

“No, but I dated her best friend.”

“X?”

“Yes, how do you know her…”

Beyond weird.

I am a witch.  Witches can get depressed too.  Sometimes the magic of life isn’t enough.  I asked one of my children to go to the newsstand before it closed while we were out running errands.  It is the only one for miles where you can buy the Financial Times, my daily rag.  They came back to say, “sold out.”  When I finished what I was doing, I said, “let’s go.”

“Where we going?”

“To the newsstand.”

“What, because you don’t believe me that they’re sold out?”

“No,” little white lie, “I want to ask them if they have any ideas where I might find one.”

As it happens, when we rocked up, they were sold out, but the woman inside the kiosk said, “well, one of the subscribers didn’t show up for their paper yesterday, so you can have it,” and that was that.

“What just happened?” my child asked.

“I got the paper.”

“But how?”

“Witchcraft.”

“I thought you said I was a witch too.”

“You are, but you don’t know how to use it yet.  And you don’t know what the nature of your power is yet.  You have to spend time with yourself to find that.”

Well.  What is the matter with me then?

This feeling of “rushing” or the need to fill every moment has a shadow side, called FOMO, the fear of missing out.  It plagues something fierce.  And it doesn’t just happen in there and now.  It can be FOMO for other places.  Like, something great is going on in Paris, but I’m in New York.  I can manage that a bit.  Because I can plan my schedule so meticulously that I tick off a million things in a year.

This kind of event-based clutter acts as a never-ending sequence of things to look forward to.  It keeps me from getting depressed, knowing that I have something exciting to look forward to.  

But there is a more insidious form of FOMO that infests my life.  It is one that is disrespectful of space-time.  One that requires me to not just be in multiple places, but also in multiple bodies, times, societies, existences.  It may sound absurd that one could miss out on things in the past, distant past, or future…or to miss being with people you don’t even know or having a life that isn’t even yours.

But it is very real for me.  I feel it at times with an ache…profound existential cramps.  The cure?  Writing.  Especially fiction.

It used to be daydreaming, but I discovered fairly early in life that daydreaming just makes things worse.  It feels good while you’re doing it, temporary symptom relief, but it makes the return a proper come down.

Moments when I am forced to “look in the mirror” such as New Years, when we take stock, think back, plan ahead, feed this horrible anxiety of what I did not do, did not live.

My coping mechanism for all of this is the idea of filling my pockets, of rushing to be in the new in an ever more present way.  Can we distract ourselves with the present?  That’s what I mean.  I can’t be distracted by something else because all distractions are already stuffed into my pockets.