They say that, when you change, the world around you changes. It does.
Lately, I have the sensation that the days and evenings are getting longer, and there is more time to handle this thing and that. Which is strange, because for as long as I can remember, I have been at odds with the clock. This isn’t about daylight savings time starting and the sun setting later; it’s about the expansion of time. I can suddenly feel it slowing down around me, like I’m in my own personal time dilation experiment. I must be getting closer to something big.
When I was in college in the late 90s, my girlfriends and I staged an “artistic” photo shoot in one of our small, carpeted apartments. The goal being: to demonstrate our angst with life. My two girlfriends tried for sexy, edgy pics, wearing short skirts, tiny tanks, lots of makeup and cleavage, and posing with stuffed animals. One posed licking a butcher knife. But my version of angst was a plain gray t-shirt and light wash jeans—my curly, highlighted hair cut in the classic 90s bob. Because I’m short, I had to stand on a kitchen chair to achieve the pose I wanted: me reaching for the analog clock hanging on the living room wall, my hands outstretched toward it while I held a pained look on my face. Barely 19 years old and already feeling like time was running out.
That’s been over 25 years but somehow it never changes. It’s always been me versus the clock… Until now. I must understand what it is that has changed, in this moment. I have the feeling that the answer is truly in the question. It has something to do precisely with this very moment, with this new “now.”
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2
I have to wonder, what is God trying to tell me?
It’s as if I feel that, from NOW, I shall continue from here on out as no other person than myself. That’s what I think the clock has been telling me all along. Time is running out while I am wasting it not being who I truly am. Not living in the moment. I sit now, watching the sun set, at more peace than I have rarely found. This very moment is, has always been, and will always be, all that I have.
Yes, there is always an endless to-do list of productive ways that I could spend my time. Productivity and performance, in perpetuity. Technically, that’s what I’ve been chasing since my college years. But now I’m finally recognizing that if I don’t fill my time actually being in a way that I love, then I am not fully using it. And I don’t mean just doing things I love to do, but actually loving the act of my own existence. Allowing that. Cultivating that.
It feels like I look outside at the world, daily, and I see it in a different way than I have before. The colors are more vibrant. But also, many things appear fake or staged, like I am on a movie set, in my own Truman Show. I find myself staring at the outlines of trees and clouds, wondering where the backdrop ends.
Are birds real?
Many days I ponder if the birds, who I love, are even real. And I’ve been watching them closely. I’ve even befriended two crows who visit me in my front yard. I love watching the white egrets who congregate around the canal down the street. They seem to favor days that are quite cold and windy. They line up on the north and south banks of the canal in five-foot increments, and stand stoically, feathers violently excited by the wind, in some sort of united standoff against the presence of blustery weather in their southern habitat. I can’t help but point out that the egrets are having their “morning meeting” every time we pass them on the way to school.
But what if the birds, in all their mysterious yet splendid patterns of life aren’t truly organic to this earth, but they are observers, spies even, keeping meticulous records, with their up-close and birds-eye views of all the goings on in a single life, or even the whole planet. Our trackers.
How do we even know what we know about all the various types of birds anyway? Our understanding of them is limited to our own human ability to observe and study. And that’s really the only way to learn anything anyway, right? By observation, examination, and experience—trying to make human sense of God’s design. And we know from the quantum level that it’s actually the act of observing that makes things take shape. It’s the energy of us turning our attention toward some thing that slows down time, puts matter to possibility, and in effect shapes our perception of it. The universe reacts to being watched. And that’s what it feels like I am doing to the entire world right now. Watching it, and re-processing it. Assigning different meanings. Taking in new waves of light, sharper colors, stranger shapes, and certainly a different resonant frequency.
So, is it truly me changing, or is it the world around me? Is it even possible for those two things to be separate?
For a long time, I would wake up every morning, desperate for change. Usually feeling defeated before I ever stepped out of the covers because I knew I was the same as the day before. And I didn’t like day-before me. In certain periods, I despised her. I wanted so badly to embrace the version of me that I could see in the distance. She radiated light, and shared her light with the world.
Finally, one day I started taking steps toward her. Small steps, throughout the day, still checking in each morning to see if I was actually changed yet or not. It was hard to see at first. Change comes slowly, as it involves stripping off so many layers of shame, guilt, grief, fear, hiding. But eventually I stood nose-to-nose with future version of me, the one who used to beckon me from a distance, and now she was inviting me to take the last step and walk insider of her.
Today I’m still unsure if I’ve fully succeeded at becoming all that she is. Truthfully, I am sure I have not. I am aware that there is yet so much more of her to embrace. I call out to her to bring me closer, don’t let me slip away. Show me how to be the real me.
But one thing I no longer do is wake up desperately looking for change. These days it seems that I wake up to a new or different world every day. And it’s funny because objectively, the stuff of life around me looks the same on the surface. My house, my body, my kids. But my mind is constantly being renewed. Partially by information I’m consuming, and partially from the way my consciousness is processing that info, observing my own experience with it, and making its own conclusions.
