Beautiful, Youthful Boredom

Time goes exponentially faster when you are marking the days through the life of a growing child. And yet, for children the days are long and imagination is the only passage through the danger of boredom.

I remember my freshman year of high school feeling like it would go on forever. Each day was an eternity, the weeks dragged slowly by and months seemed like they would never lead to spring and summer breaks. Sophomore year was less unbearably slow, junior year was the first year of high school that I really enjoyed and it seemed to fly by. By senior year, it felt like the warmth of spring that led to that final walk out of the doors of Central High School was creeping into the halls before I’d finished going through my first syllabus. Time undoubtedly accelerates as one’s life goes on, but nothing compares to the whirlwind of time that blows by as a mother watches her infant grow.

Motherhood was once explained to me this way: the days are long but the years fly by. And the phenomenon of time accelerating as we age has been said to be due to the fact that as we get older, one year is a smaller and smaller fraction of our lives. When we are two, a year is half our life. No wonder junior high took a century to get through; those years were a tenth of my life. Now a year is one thirtieth of my life, a thin slice of time that seems to hurdle past me as I run to catch up, to get involved, to embrace life and live it up, to be productive yet relax, stop and smell the roses. It is a difficult balance to find as I maybe say too often. But motherhood has indeed put many of these opposing forces into perspective.

Mothers, indeed adults in general, perhaps American adults in particular seem to grow busier each year they are alive. Obligations and activities get tacked onto our days like an overfull bulletin board. My life now feels like an unpleasant race, like the eight-hundred in track: a full sprint that lasts longer than your body wants to sprint.

I think the most vexing thing about how fast our days are racing by is that even the things I love to do start to feel like chores I have to check off the list. Twila and I planted seeds in our new planter box a few days ago. The sky was completely clear, blue, the lake was glassy, birds sang in the air which was the heavenly temperature of high sixties, low seventies and life was serene and fun and my daughter and I had our fingers in the dirt and were working together, the baby was napping and the cats were still in the basement from the night and the scene really couldn’t have been more perfect. But completer that I am, I could not help but mentally page through my ever-growing, never-ending to do list as we worked, laughed and played.

What a Grinch. How can anyone not completely enter into the moment of planting vegetables with her daughter? What on earth is life about if it’s not that: interacting with a child; growing food? If this isn’t the very essence of life than I don’t know what is. But something about my human nature, or my American nature, refuses to let me fully enter into it. I stay at the surface of the experience looking for what I will cross off my list next.

Even the things that drive my passion most deeply, like writing, takes its place on my list of chores right next to unload the dishwasher and take the laundry out of the washer so it doesn’t get that telltale neglected laundry mildew smell. Shouldn’t writing get a special place in my day? A place of honor that cannot be put aside for anything, not even the threat of mildew laundry? I think the only thing I do more efficiently than race through the day and subsequently my life, is complain about the fact that I am racing through life at lightning speed.

So all this complaining about how fast time goes; watching my daughters grow in speed screen like those time lapse videos of pregnancy, leads me to believe that there must be something that can be done to slow the rapid disappearance of my daughter’s youth, and my life.

In reality time is not speeding up. The years are every bit as long as they were when I walked to school in January in sixth grade and the expanse of the snow-covered playground may as well have been the arctic tundra. Time, I have to assume stays constant no matter how old and busy we are. In short, we all (young and old) have the same number of hours in the day.

Perhaps time seems to move slower for kids because they have so little to do. I remember feeling bored when I was a kid. Bored. Boredom is a phenomenon I haven’t experienced in years. There just isn’t time to be bored. Perhaps if there was, I might have to seek out an activity. It’s when we are seeking out activities that we wind up doing glorious things like read a book or rock in a hammock; walk on the shoreline looking for pretty rocks, poke our fingers into the dirt and drop seeds with the hope that they will grow up to look like broccoli and various kinds of lettuce. It’s when I have extra time that I ask my daughter what she wants to do.

And it’s through Twila’s youth, her quickly changing and growing youth, that I can occasionally recapture the feeling that each day is a wide and open expanse of time waiting to be navigated anew each morning. But it is only if I make the choice to have extra time that I can be welcomed into Twila’s world. Because she never rushes. When she plays it is slowly and thoughtfully and she fully enters into the world of play. It is through her commitment to each creative activity, each curiosity and fancy that I can, occasionally relive this beautiful, youthful boredom.