The passage of time

My last official day of holiday. I could never understand why people said that kind of thing, before, but now I do: I would’ve been home for the weekend anyway, so the last two days of my leave aren’t really leave days.

Recently, I’ve found myself waking up with a feeling of dismay at the passage of time. So weird! I don’t know if it’s an omen, or just part of the Standard Middle-Aged Package. Of course, by the time I get out of bed, I have a mental To Do list and I’m up, up and away. But the next morning, the feeling is back again. A close friend who died in 1984, at the tender age of 24, described surfing to me. He tried so hard to get me to move from being curious about it to actually learning to surf, and he died before I’d taken the plunge. He told me to close my eyes and imagine myself standing barefooted on a very slippery surface, cool to the touch, that was moving at an immense speed over which I had no control. That’s how I feel about life, right now.

About three years ago, I read the book, Quiet, by Susan Cain; the by-line is ‘’The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking’’. She deals with, amongst a host of other things, our personalities, our peculiarities, what we contribute to group situations, and our preferred ways of going through any activity. I finally learnt to fully accept myself, while reading that book. I’d always known that I abhorred superficiality, but I finally understood that the reflective style of my journalling and blogging was about not wanting anything I’d experienced to go by undocumented. Of course, this style of living can be extremely frustrating, because life is just too busy for everything to be documented – but that’s part of my Trudy dilemma. I have a hunger for life, for experiences that feed my soul, but I have an unslakeable thirst for recording and reflecting on those experiences, as though living life is somehow incomplete without a written record of it. It’s like a more cerebral version of the modern-speak expression, “Selfie, or it didn’t happen.”

In the book I’m working through at the moment, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron deals with the topic of perfectionism, in Week 8 of a 12-week course in rediscovering your artist self.  She writes about how we’re so steeped in the mindset that things have to be perfect, in order to exist at all, that many of us simply don’t produce anything – we’re in fact paralysed by our belief in ‘’100% or don’t bother’’. I reflected on how, despite my raising my kids with an encouraging philosophy of “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing”, I myself am guilty of this quest for perfectionism. The day I read that section of the book, I posted a video of a recent performance on Facebook. I didn’t care how many people viewed it, I was just ready to put it out there, even though it wasn’t perfect. And it felt good. It felt like a celebration of my art. 

In the latter half of 2017, I was given a new set of responsibilities at work. It took me two months of grappling with whether I was good enough or not, to finally be at peace with the new role - which I’d actually been doing, during the two months of grappling! What was the turning point? Accepting that no-one (besides me) was expecting me to be perfect at it, and that it would be an interesting new skill set that I would acquire, over time. Once I understood that it was a process, pretty much like everything else in life, I exhaled, and found my peace.

So maybe that’s how I should deal with my morning dread about how quickly life is passing me by – and I suppose I do so already – and that is to yield to the aspects that are out of my control, like the fast-moving ocean beneath a surfer’s feet, and immerse myself in the beauty and joy that are all around me, waiting for me to live every day of my life to the fullest. Even though I haven’t tried surfing yet, that curiosity has never left me. Maybe, in my life, the call of the ocean is not merely symbolic.

I will continue to live with all my senses at full alert, taking in the many sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feels and other-sensory stimuli all around me. And when I find time, write. 

Because that’s how I make sense of it all.

                               South African (Capetonian) surfing champion, Cass Collier.