Time

This post is in honour of Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain. As all the kids, both young and old, scuttle about getting ready for ghoulish dress-up and trick-or-treating, I’m reminded of how my life has become rather chaotic of late. That’s saying something, as I’ve become rather good at multi-tasking my little heart out on a myriad of projects, while I seek to continue to pay the bills primarily with my writing, but endeavour at the same time to keep my own writing projects — namely my novel — from constantly being sidelined. I’m much better at time management than I used to be, but I will freely admit that it’s an ongoing struggle for me to consistently make the best use of the time allotted to me in a day. If I could forgo sleep, I would; however, I’m kinda beastly if I don’t get at least 7 hours of beauty rest.

My original goal with this site has been to post at least once a week. With that in mind I purposely saved Friday’s post for Saturday, so I could share how my orientation as a human book at the Toronto Public Library went. Well, my weekend ran away from me and now that post is being saved for this Friday. So, stay tuned for that.

But back to time and how fleeting it is. I find that all the clichés about time are horrendously true, especially these two: “time flies when you are having fun” and “the older you get the faster time goes by.” Why is that? If you read this fascinating article on it, then you know it has to do with the senses and how deeply they are invoked and thus how densely the memoires of these moments are recorded in our brains. We tend to remember our firsts: first kisses, first impressions of people, first trips to new places; and our lasts: graduations, final goodbyes, last kisses. We remember these moments vividly, almost in slow motion. They are what we write about in our stories because these are the most important times of our lives, or our characters’ lives, because they are so charged with sensory emotion. It’s these powerful place-holders in our minds that good stories are built around. Everything in between just tends to get lost in the stream of moment-to-moment. And yet, it’s so easy to get caught up in our daily routine that if feels like life just goes by us in a blur, save for these moments in time that mean something. It takes a certain skill to be able to hold onto those memorable moments as they happen, and to appreciate them and enjoy them before the daily roller-coaster of life WHOOSHES by us again.

So I suppose it’s no surprise that this holiday, as lost as it is amidst the commercialism and candy, is such an important time of year, because it’s all about time. The winding down of it, the dying off of the year from autumn into winter, and when you are faced with the end of time, you are frantic to grab hold of one last moment before it’s all gone. Moments like these are rich for reflection. One of the ancient rituals of the Celtic celebration of Samhain involves the cleansing of ritual fire. People would celebrate the year’s harvest with huge bonfires and into these conflagrations they would toss slips of paper, upon which were written things they’d been carrying with them all year. Things that they’d like to be rid of. Perhaps failed goals, or an old love that still haunted them, or worries about health, finances and family. Tossing these worries into the fire cleansed them and prepared them like the fields that now lay fallow, to be fresh and ready for new experiences to come the following spring.

So as the creatures of the night are out celebrating and gathering as many treats as they can fit into a pillowcase or plastic pumpkin, I’m going to light a candle, slow down time, and revel in the rich memories of this past year. Then I will cast off the failures of 2011 into the fire, so that I may ready myself for a winter of gestating the goals I want to realize in the spring of the coming year.

Happy Hallow’s Eve!