What to Do With the Time That is Given Us

In his Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R Tolkien wrote, “All we can do is decide what to do with the time that is given us.” That is more true today than it perhaps has ever been in your lifetime – you have grown up having your hours engaged and scheduled and managed for more than any of us would like to admit. The collective ‘us’ that is running the show, telling you and ourselves how important it is to pursue and achieve and excel. Perhaps in that effort, honorable as it seems, has not been as helpful or beneficial as we’ve imagined.

This particular gift has arrived in a most unattractive form – no one wishes for a pandemic any more than one “expects the Spanish Inquisition”, as the Monty Python boys say. But here we are. And gratitude and purpose will be lifelines for all of us right now as much as the community-minded care that says ‘stay home and stay away for safety and the health of all of us’. So here are my lifelines: here is what they can do, what we will need them for, and what we will be able to do with them when the dust settles and we can once again begin to rebuild and rethink and repair.

In his memoir, “Night”, Elie Wiesel opens the preface to the New Translation, published in 2006 by Hill and Wang, by writing,

“If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works… In retrospect, I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer – or my life, period – would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory… The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”

I’ve skipped much of his valuable musings in this new preface, which precedes a newly translated version of his writing. His wife, Marion, translated this latest edition before his death. The person who knew him best, knew what his intentions were, knew what it was he hoped to leave behind. In this preface, Wiesel questions what he has managed to capture of his World War II Holocaust experience. He survived it seems by chance when his family was not so fortunate. Or perhaps being the one left behind to tell the tale in hopes that humanity never makes the same mistakes twice was more of a life sentence than the death rows of concentration camps. Whatever Wiesel carried, he didn’t keep it inside or shoulder it alone; he chose to use his fallible human abilities to tell the stories that needed preservation. He did not “want his past to become [the] future” for anyone else.

We can learn from his selflessness and self reflection. Our world has never been perfect. As one of my wise-beyond-her-years students said in a class discussion this past semester, “I don’t think we’ve known yet what it is to live in peace.” This is true to a degree from the micro to the macro in our world – within our families, communities, provinces, countries, and world, there is ‘Us vs Them’, ‘me first, you second’, and the idea that somehow there is only enough for the few and not the many.

We have lived in fear. You may be feeling that you are just learning fear now, but it has been there as we’ve made decisions about who gets what, how we use what we have, and how we treat those we feel deserve less than we do. Writer Kurt Vonnegut often quoted Eugene V. Debs in relation to his own writings: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”. In his novel Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut explores the idea that humans are “bugs trapped in amber”, that we are victims of time, with our heads wrapped in concrete with access to only a tiny tube of vision available as we run in one direction only down a rail line. While we may be bound by time and space, we are certainly not victims of these; remember Tolkien – we have choice, we get to DECIDE what to do with “the time that is given us”. Choice is confirmed by Wiesel, who chose to spend his life preserving history and testimony with fallible human words, hoping it would be enough to save future generations from the horrors he endured.

If you’ve ever been in my classroom, you will have seen the poster I made and stuck up on the wall front and center above my smartboard and whiteboards. It’s a universal paradox: You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your choice.

Believing you have choice right now can be a lifeline. If we were to give ourselves over to nihilistic thinking, believe that humanity is doomed to repeat its mistakes and lurch towards some sort of doomed conclusion, we would be missing the gift that this pandemic has given us: time and choice.

We have the luxury of being in a country that is doing everything possible to keep our most vulnerable safe and funded and cared for. It might not go as fast or as smoothly as some of us would like, but we are ALL taking care of each other in unprecedented ways.

My grandparents on both sides lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was no work, there was famine, and there were people struggling to keep food in the mouths of their families to the point that they were willing to strap themselves underneath train cars for days and weeks in search of some sort of work.

My Dad’s Mom was born to farmers in Manitoba. They were in a position to help, and help they did. They fed the mouths that passed by their farm, and let them sleep in the haylofts. They asked for those they fed to do a chore or two, maybe chop some wood or help with the cattle, so that the men didn’t feel they were ‘taking charity’ or losing their dignity, but rather contributing and helping in return those who were helping them. We need to help – it brings out the best in us and in others. If we can only offer help and never ask for it, we are not yet in deep community. No one wants to live in fear of asking for help, it goes against who were are as humans at our deepest core.

My Mom’s Mom was born to a single mother with three boys. She became single shortly after my Grandma was born, and did her best to keep everyone alive and well on her own in a time when there were no social services or community supports. They would go to a diner and order bowls of hot water, to make soup out of the ketchup on the tables. But they did survive – the people they knew took care of them, and made sure that everyone made it through the Depression and onward. And today, my family has returned and continued the kindnesses shown and the help needed by becoming social workers, nurses, teachers, massage therapists, speech therapists, listeners, caregivers, community members, and more. We do not carry bitterness from those thin times – we know how vital gratitude is to survival, and that things will not always be the way they are now.

I imagine what my grandmas would say to me now. I’ve had access to more education and opportunity than my Grandma Rachel, who only finished Grade 2 before she had to drop out and support the family, could have ever dreamed. I hope that I’ve made her proud with what I’ve chosen to do with the gift of time given me.

Nicola Yoon in her novel, “The Sun is Also a Star” quotes Carl Sagan in her prologue:

Carl Sagan said that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction-level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Cro-Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.

To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.”

What Yoon means with this prologue, is that everything is connected. She tells the story in this novel from the perspective of the Universe, which sees all. She represents in this story only the beginning of the deep connections that exist between all of us, regardless of our feelings about other people. We do not exist in a bubble, and the evidence of the pandemic we are living through now is the most persuasive evidence any of us have ever known.

It would be easy to complain about the toilet paper hoarding. But, as someone who actually is on her last three rolls, I can’t tell you how many people have offered salvation and sharing to me from their own supplies, large or small. I’m not worried. I have known my whole life how people take care of each other. I’ve been cared for, and I’ve cared for others. That’s how we’re supposed to live and work and love. It’s the reason any of us are here at all.

And we ARE HERE. My neuroscience professor made it crystal clear that I and you and all of us are the result of millions of possibilities. Something could go wrong at any stage, and yet so many of us make it through the nine months our mothers carry us, through our impossibly fragile first year, and on through all the years we have in the time that is given us.

So. What do we do now? Where do we want to go from here? What testimony should we capture as we witness the events we are living in now? I’ll leave you with an excerpt from “The Magician’s Nephew” by C.S. Lewis. If you don’t already know, “The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe” is not the first book of his beautifully crafted series. The Pevensie children only get to Narnia through the wardrobe because of the events of this first book – a vision of the multiverse theory, written as milk for babes and meat for men. If you are wondering what we do next – we use the time that is given us to sing the new world to life, as Aslan does when he creates Narnia.

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar. “Gawd!” said the Cabby. “Ain’t it lovely?”

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out — single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time.

If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing. “Glory be!” said the Cabby. “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.” The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter. And now something else was happening. Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing.”

*This post was written for my Charles Spencer Mavericks, and originally shared via Maverick Radio, Wednesday, March 18, 2020