The Sunday Letter, Part Four
I’ve been thinking, lately, about time. Time in both the cosmic sense—13.7 billion years, anyone? How do you even begin to comprehend this?—and also the miniscule, human-centred sense of it. The way that an hour can stretch on for days. The way that a year can feel like a lifetime, and sometimes often is. And then, on the opposite side of things, how entire years can vanish when you blink. How your childhood seems endless when you’re young and then one day you open your eyes and realize: I’m old.
How did that happen? When did things change?
Earlier this month I began the second half of my tenure as the 2022-2023 Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University. It’s a residency hosted jointly by the university and the Hamilton Public Library, and for this second semester I have a room at the library where I’ve been meeting with writers—aspiring ones, emerging ones, people who’ve never written before but have a short story collection swirling inside of them like the hydrogen that swirled around our universe and coalesced into stars so many billions of years ago.
It is wonderful work, and humbling, and I still feel faintly astonished whenever I walk in the library and see my face on the posters. There’s an A-frame sign in the middle of the grand foyer with my face and my name on it. Like I’m someone official. Somebody someone might want to pay attention to. Amazing!
In addition to providing critiques on writing excerpts, one of the things that I do as a Writer-in-Residence is talk about the business of writing. A few days ago someone came in and listened to me talk for almost an hour about writing: the construction paper booklets I made when I was six, the plans with my then-closest friend to be the writer and she the illustrator; the story I scribbled in a notebook in high school that would eventually become the basis for The Miracles of Ordinary Men; the bone-deep understanding, even in high school, that what I wanted to do was write, and so life had to be about getting a day job in order to survive to do that. But what kind of day job? Those questions led me to study writing at university and then to pursue an MFA under the mistaken assumption that eventually I would teach. And then I went and got that MFA and came out of it with a lot of debt and the creeping realization that I didn’t actually want to be a teacher.
And then there was a decade of scrambling for work—admin work, support worker work, dogwalking work. I wrote grant applications for a church in Edinburgh and marked thesis papers for ESL students at the university. I wrote. I had no money. Eventually I had no money to such an extent that I had to move home, and the scramble for work began all over again on a different continent.
I wrote through all of this. Sometimes I wrote a lot and sometimes I wrote next to nothing. I published a novel and watched it flower briefly in the landscape that is Candian publishing and then sink back into the soil. I got a job working at a hospital in Hamilton. I did admin work for the emergency psychiatry unit and streamed Game of Thrones on the hospital computer when nights were slow and no patients came in. From early 2014 through to late 2015, I made more money doing this, sitting at a desk and watching Internet TV, than I’d ever made in my life up to that moment.
What is the point, I remember thinking during most of that year. What is the point of writing at all if I make so much more money just doing this?
A year or two years or ten is nothing when you think about it from the standpoint of the universe. A year arguably isn’t even much from the standpoint of the planet, climate change notwithstanding—with every year that marches us closer to that point-of-no-return I find comfort in the fact that the earth will survive in some way, even if (and when?) we do not.
And yet, a year also is the universe, isn’t it. Think about all of the changes that you experience in a year—the giant ones, the miniscule ones, the changes that are invisible until they’re so present you can’t see anything else. In my darkest moments in 2015 I was sinking under the belief that change would never happen—that my life and my writing would always stay where it was, would never go anywhere, would not bring me the life I had hoped for for so long.
But change was already happening, wasn’t it. The online publications that made me little money but meant eyes on my work; the grant applications that were rejected and rejected and then, slowly, began to shift. The publication on The Rumpus that got me so excited and then, eventually, like everything else, dwindled away. The two novels after The Miracles of Ordinary Men that were rejected and relegated to dust and then, slowly, slowly, the strange stories that came out of that dust and despair. So many days spent trudging to work and back through the summer heat, the autumn leaves, the winter snow. Slow, slow, slow.
Everything happened so slowly that it never felt like change.
But the truth is that things were changing all of the time, even though I couldn’t see it. The truth is that I was caught in that ineffable thing that we humans do with time, where we experience it as the universe when really it is smaller than a grain of sand.
The truth is that time and change were saving my life even then.
Because this is what our universe is, isn’t it. Slow change, and also change in every instant. No man ever steps in the same river twice. The stars that swirl above us, the many billions of planets that exist out there where we can’t see—they are changing too, with every second that goes by.
The Buddhists call this impermanence. All that exists is impermanent; nothing lasts. The good and also the bad. It’s the most painful realization—because nothing lasts forever, even the people and the relaitonships you cherish the most—and also the most liberating, because even the worst things you can experience will come to an end in one way or another. They may come to an end in difficult ways, like death, or they may soften and pass through you the way that hurts often do if they are given enough time.
Our entire universe is woven through with this truth. Nothing lasts forever, not even the stars. Change can be slow—it can occur over centuries and thousands of lifetimes. Think of our pale blue planet. How many guises has our beloved Earth worn in her 4 billion years? Or it can be rapid and almost instantaneous. An earthquake, a hurricane, and fire.
And change can feel slow, even as it’s occuring over the relatively short span of time of a few measly Earth years.
I think about this every time I walk into the downtown Hamilton library and see my face on that poster. I’ve been writing professionally for twenty-three years now, nearly a quarter of a century, and it almost never feels like I know enough or have done enough to be here, speaking to other writers like I’m someone who knows what she’s talking about. How did that change happen? One minute the universe is a hot dense ball of matter and the next minute/several million years or so, hydrogen and helium are clumping together to form stars and galaxies and planets that hold entire civilizations, ecosystems, countless lives and loves. One minute you’re struggling and buried by the weight of what feels like failed expectations, and then the next minute you have an office at a university (even a temporary one—impermanence rules!) and people are booking time with you because all those minutes and days and years of struggle and imperceptible change have made you into someone who might just Have Worthwhile Things To Say.
I published my first novel a decade ago. So much has changed in the intervening years that it really does feel like a universe exists in the space between now and then. And yet, in the grand scheme of this magical place that we live in, it really has been no time. And it will doubly be no time after I’m gone and my work fades away. What a gift that is, just like the Buddhists say. To understand that the change that happens each moment and brings you forward into the future is one of only a relative handful of changes that you’ll experience over the course of your blink-of-an-eye life. The work of loving them all, sitting in wonder with them all, is the work that I’ll be doing for however long this writing gig—this living gig—lasts.
Currently Reading: The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Currently Watching: Truth Be Told
Currently Eating: This Food 52 Cardamom Cake, and also the Khoshary with Red Lentil Ragu from Shahir Massoud’s Eat, Habibi, Eat!