By Tabitha Bozeman
One of my favorite poems about motherhood is Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song,” and the first line is “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” From the very beginning of our lives and our children’s lives, time is ticking by, faster and faster it seems. But, we have more power than we realize to slow it down.
At night, I like to put on “sleepy music” that is calming, binaural beats that help me sleep well. Occasionally, though, I choose the wrong song, and something will come on with an insistent, beat waking me up in an alarm clock panic. Time is always ticking, and becoming a mother sped life up in a way that is still hard to fully grasp. The busier I am, the faster my days seem to speed by.
This week, I sat in my classroom as students took their final exam and realized that the morning had drifted by more slowly than usual. I thought “Why on earth is time moving so much more slowly when it generally seems to have sped up lately?” It took a few minutes for it to hit me: I have mostly given up caffeine.
That is not entirely true. I mostly drink water, but will drink tea and the occasional soda or coffee. I haven’t given up caffeine exactly, but I have sworn off energy drinks. I have also given up scrolling social media. Well, that is not entirely true either: I have given up doomscrolling through things that make me feel anxious. Sometimes, though, I will realize I’ve been swiping through fun videos longer than I intended and am, as T.S. Eliot said, “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
Maybe, there is a reason those little videos are so popular, though. We are continuously bombarded with demands to our time and attention, sold time-saving tools, and guilted for not doing everything. I wonder if we aren’t so much focused as we are rushing, busy all the time as our time slips through our days. Henry David Thoreau tells us “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” Watching kitten playing or heartwarming wildlife videos can be considered wasting time. But, maybe it can also be a way to remind ourselves of what it means to truly live life. If I spend my days in an energy drink fueled, frenetic hurry to check off all the tasks on my To Do list, am I being efficient and productive? Yes. But, do I want to look back and realize that I spent much of my time in a blur?
Annie Dilliard reminds us that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I often notice that the faster my day goes, the fewer experiential details I pay attention to. For example, I might get a large number of things graded, posted, and written, but I might not pay any attention to what the weather is like, or how the birds sound on my way inside, or how good it feels to take off my shoes after work and walk across the living room floor barefoot.
Recently, I’ve tried taking time to make sure I have quieter, slower, less urgent moments, hours, and days. I take time to notice the small details and moments that we often become accustomed to allowing to blur past us. With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about how I want my children to remember intentional attention coming from me because “attention is the beginning of devotion” (Mary Oliver). As a mother, I have often noticed that I can never just consider a place or situation or dinner menu according to what I think. Instead, I am always simultaneously thinking about my children and how they are affected, what they’d like, and so on. Real attention, real love is found in the details, the attention, the time we are willing to spend with and give those we hold dear. Our goal shouldn’t be to move faster through life or do more with our time, but to be present enough to actually experience this life we are moving through.
