musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me


I am not a creature of weeks anymore; nor do I even hold the days – or at least their names- as sacred now… And yet it is not the passing of time to which I object, but its labels. I mean would a day with another name smell as sweet, or is it fastened, somehow to its name, its order, or the days when religion or tradition says you’re supposed to honour it? They sometimes seem very much the same now that I’m retired; unless I poke my head outside and realise I need to bring an umbrella or sunscreen with me I don’t see much that differentiates them from one another.

I suppose most names are like that, though -even personal names; they’re just labels that allow me to get someone’s attention, and let them know I could recognize them even in a crowd; labels which suggest that they matter, if only in the moment of their identification. It would be a sad thing to be merely a name however and stripped of the other attributes carefully cultivated over time: qualities which are worn like badges at a convention.

Still, it’s easier to understand names as instruments for identifying things: touchable constructs, physical objects which have unique features and characteristics. But Tuesday is a day like any other, except for its arbitrary designation as a Tuesday… If it demarcates a birthday, or perhaps the day you leave on a trip, there’s really no requirement that in some other year, that it would necessarily happen again on a Tuesday, and not some other day. Tuesday is not a thing, it’s a temporal label: a helpful signpost, perhaps, but not a building you could enter, or a streetcar that you could use if you wanted. A thing would, barring some renovation, still be recognizable as a building, say, no matter when in the month, no matter when in the year…

I wrote an essay about Time last year,[i] but its theme was more about the temporal aspects of Time (time of, time to, or time for), than the more designatory calendric time: that today is a day when I’m supposed to be at work, and not whether it is now a Tuesday… Time wears many hats.

But I live in Time, not in days; I am the Book, not the pages. It has taken an uncountable number  of them to realize that in time, a life well-lived has no need of units, just memories; people, not days… not even months that flit by like nameless flocks of migrating birds, nor years that flow like water and on which I float. There, only the sea matters, not the calendar…

And yet, sometimes I long for stable units; some way to measure my progress before I arrive. Time sat down during Covid, I think; the days no longer designated when to be in the office, they merely passed; most days, unless there was an Email reminder of an online meeting coming up, were just a matter of counting sleeps, circling the days on a calendar, or setting a reminder of upcoming deadlines on my phone. Work days on the computer were often arbitrarily assigned, and so-called leisure time -or empty time- was what greeted me otherwise. Today was the name of each endlessly repetitive day.

But it’s not Covid-Time now, and anyway I’m retired; there are no deadlines to worry about; there are decreasingly few obligations; and even fewer signposts to remind me of where I am in the meaningless heptagonal clusters of days that were my weeks; or the forgettable foursomes that, if piled together enough times, became the year.

I realize I’m exaggerating, of course -although at my age, dementia is just a sunset away. Actually, I’m probably more mildly cyclothymic than depressed, but still, no matter where I happen to be sitting on the emotional Bell Curve at the time, I enjoy living -no describing– my moods in words. Experience must be, well, experienced, and I tend to sublimate emotional experience into essays, stories and not emotions; and certainly not days. I suppose it confuses others around me, though, and I am beginning to suspect that it might be better to disguise my words more cleverly: surrender to the siren call of those days that entrap my friends…

There are times, albethey infrequent, when I get phone calls whose obvious intent is to cheer me up, and remind me, say, that tomorrow is Wednesday and that the guys are hoping to see me at our usual coffee meeting in the Food Court at the mall. Things like that are worrisome; I am touched that they care; I am concerned that I am giving the wrong impression to them…or maybe to myself…

I am merely trying to understand, however; I am someone who sometimes wades through Time as if it were knee-deep water as a strength-building exercise, not because I need to reach the safety of the shore, but because it is a challenge to adapt to the current. Unlike lifting weights, or running on a treadmill, the object is not simply to endure it, but to gain from it, to learn something from the fatigue.

And somewhere deep inside I actually realize that the repetitive succession of days is not meaningless any more than practicing scales on the piano is pointless, or that dusting my now too-spacious house is like solving Pi to another useless few numbers cannot solve the issue. The horizon is always far away and like the rainbow, you can never reach it. You don’t need to time the days; I know that…

I am reminded of Georg Cantor and his obsession with the measurement of infinity, only to discover that there were different types of infinity; different sizes of infinity. My naïve concern about whether or not there is an endless, and hence useless, succession of Tuesdays, seems laughable in comparison. I can’t manage to convey my idiosyncrasy to the group who meet me for coffee on Wednesdays, though -especially those who sometimes worry that I won’t show up and argue with them. But I will always argue with them; it’s who I am -no matter the day…

For most of them it seems that our meetings for coffee are simply called ‘the Wednesdays‘. That is all they feel they need to know. I have not grilled them on other important day-names in their lives; perhaps in the world we retirees occupy, that should suffice; perhaps I have worried for nothing…

Still, next Wednesday I think I might suggest we change it to a Tuesday just to see if they can handle it.

[i] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2025/01/12/tic-tocks/

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