One Certain Sunset
There’s always time, until there isn’t….
Advice is a funny thing: you usually don’t understand its relevance until it’s too late. As a father, I’m faced with offering advice to my kids, only it’s usually met with rolling eyes, or, “I know that, Dad….” Once in a while, usually years later, you’ll have a child or someone come back to you and say, “You know that thing you said, you were so right about that. I wish I’d understood it then.”
I’m sure you’ve had that experience. Advice is the one thing that has to be timed perfectly for it to have any chance of success: the listener has to be relaxed enough to hear it, be frustrated enough (usually) to need it, and be at the right moment in their personal evolution to understand it. I count myself among these people, too, because I know I’m as guilty as anyone of thinking I know what I need to know. Then again, I’m older now, so I’m more correct in that sentiment than I used to be. Which makes it even less likely I’ll recognize when I need it. So it goes.
Living in the moment is one of those hackneyed sentiments we all hate to hear, at least I do. It sounds so trite. And I think, “What does he know about that? – it’s such a personal thing.” Even if I don’t think that, it sounds so touchy-feely I want to turn the channel. Shut it off. Check my phone (again) to find something better. So I won’t say that. Not exactly, anyway.
Back in my mid-thirties I was on a business trip in Tucson doing some work at Intuit. I was alone, away from my family, and one evening found myself driving west of town on Speedwell. If you don’t know it, it starts like most roads near an interstate, with strip malls and all manner of urban sprawl. Soon, though, the trappings of civilization fell away and I was winding back into some hills where I found a turnout into Tucson Mountain Park. No one else was there, and when I switched off the rental car, there was actual silence, or something close to it. I think there were cicadas humming, or perhaps that’s my rosy recollection embellishing the moment. It was warm, being May, but not too hot. Saguaro dotted the landscape, crawling up the sides of the hills out to where they overlooked the valley. Without anything like a plan, I found myself climbing a path which wound around the hill closest to the lot, to a neatly formed peak where I found I could sit and lean back against a warm rock and look west toward the setting sun.
The project I was doing occupied my thoughts for a bit, but began to melt away, and I found myself looking toward the valley without a thought in my head. There was no worry or fretting, there was no to-do list to bother me, I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, I wasn’t exhausted. A recollection came into my head, hovering just inside my awareness of a filmed monologue by Spaulding Gray called Swimming to Cambodia. In that monologue he mentioned something he always did while traveling which he described as searching for a perfect moment. He hoped to have one each trip if he could, though one couldn’t force it. One could just set up the conditions for it, relax, and hope to achieve that kind of balance without really trying. I suddenly realized I was having that exact experience at that moment, and the truth of his sentiment became apparent to me. Then I let it go, so I could more fully enjoy those seconds, devoid of responsibility, nagging worry and concern, to just be.
For me that became my One Certain Sunset, and I return to that memory often. There’s a lesson there about using time as a personal balm. Usually time, from my experience, manifests like a stop-watch or countdown clock. It’s a menace that compresses my days like a vice, that makes seconds precious but in a bad way, that makes it feel like I’m losing time I need to fulfill commitments. I’m not saying that’s an unnecessary feeling, but we do need to find the means to escape that equation. Time can be spent more wisely. We can lavish in the splendor of unformatted seconds and minutes and hours, rather than languish in the anxiety of deadlines. Easier said than done, I know, but it seemed time to say it.
So that’s my message. Remember that sunset of your own. There’s no time like the present, and the present can be a present like no other, if you’re willing to receive it with an unburdened mind.
(Photo courtesy of Alison Christiana Photography)
