On Pause
My car keeps track. I've sat at a standstill, the engine momentarily off, for more than a week over the past five years. These hours accumulated from mostly short, seconds-long stops, not multi-minute long ones. What if I had a similar stopwatch for other micro time-consuming activities, like deleting unwanted emails? Last week, some ailment zapped my energy and subsequent motivation to accomplish anything despite having plenty I want to do! My mental well-being is predicated on progress, on realizing some kind of potential, however modest, whether organizing a mess of computer work files, or helping a client take another step forward. I need to feel a sense of motion, to have contributed to something that has me ending my day in a different place than I started. Stasis is difficult, whether imposed by a traffic light or germ. Maybe it's my father's death, or the evolving perspective of middle-age, or my car's idle-time stopwatch, but my awareness has been heightened. Maybe growing up gay in the first devastating decade of AIDS has something to do with it as well, witnessing the indiscriminate clearcutting of adjacent generations. Silence equals death; time is precious. The drive downtown the other day was relatively quick. I was fearful that being sick would prevent me from seeing an out-of-town friend again before he left for another year. As we parted, I insisted on a second hug goodbye, some deep instinct wanting to momentarily fill the space, delay the inevitable parting and the beginning of another stopwatch ticking.
