An Infinity in Just One Day

the strange effects of love and loss on time

Issue #67

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities….But Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how grateful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

Dear Reader,

This is a quote from John Green’s novel, The Fault in our Stars. In this moment, Hazel Grace reflects on the depth of love and life she experienced in her brief relationship with Augustus Waters. You gave me forever within the numbered days. The author names something true about the strange behavior of time within our one precious life.

Falling in love is certainly one kind of infinity. It’s all eye contact and dopamine and firsts and moving to a soundtrack only the two of you can hear while the rest of the world is muted. That’s how it was when I fell in love with my husband twenty-six years ago.

Some good friends of ours are in their own little infinity right now, living in the first month as new parents. Our friend said, “I feel like I have permission to say no to the rest of the world and just stay right here with our little family…I feel more present than I’ve ever felt in my life.” His wife added, “Time goes by incredibly slow and incredibly fast.” 

I remember that same little infinity when I first experienced it twenty-four years ago. How three hours seemed to last twenty-four hours and a day seemed to disappear in seconds. How my husband and I and our newborn were in a world unto ourselves and everyone else was merely a visitor.

“Some infinities are bigger than others.”

One of the longest periods of my life was the day our infant daughter had open heart surgery. My husband and I existed in our own time and space and everyone else in the waiting room was blurred out as we waited to hear whether our daughter had made it through the operation. We were present in the most painful way, there wasn’t a tv show or book or conversation that could pull us from the vortex we’d fallen into. And though we had loving friends and family nearby, they couldn’t stand in our shoes and know exactly what it was like to have our daughter’s life in question.

If one infinity can be just a day, it can also span fifteen years or so, like it did when I was a full-time mother of four. I was the one with a child in a sling at my hip and three other children always overlapping my heart and my body. We were more like a five-headed creature than five individual human beings. 

During those years I would get occasional glimpses of the beauty of what I had, often at the end of the day when I looked at my people asleep in their beds. Suddenly I wanted to wake everyone up and tell them I was sorry I’d yelled and that now I was ready to laugh and play and also remind them how much I loved them. But I wasn’t crazy either, so I let them sleep and the days passed, vacillating between light speed and a snail crawl.

This season of young kids is almost impossible to savor no matter how often older parents tell you to do just that. Those older parents are calling out from another time zone and their words get muddled across the distance. You’re holding onto your life like a free solo climber on the side of a cliff. It takes every inch of you to do the job you're doing and it feels like you will never get back onto stable ground. And then the credits are rolling and forever is over. The five-headed creature is no more and the woman with the baby in the sling is merely a ghost. 

“Some infinities are bigger than others.” 

There are infinities in friendships, whether they last a few years or lifetime. 

The first few nights after my dad went into a mental hospital, sleep was the sweetest invitation, to slumber in a void far away from the truth that arrived new and shocking each time the sun rose. 

Several years later he passed away and the month after he died was endless. I remember thinking as I grieved, “Why doesn’t the whole world stop?” I wore the same green hooded sweatshirt and jeans every day because I couldn’t make choices. I had to call a friend from the parking lot of the grocery store and ask her what to buy so I could make my family dinner. Though our culture doesn’t like to acknowledge the reality of death, somehow there was still time allotted (at least for a few weeks) for the infinity of loss.

My friend (the new dad) didn’t realize he was describing infinity when he named being “more present than I’ve ever been in my life”. In times of this degree of intensity, we’re fully present to the person that we love, or fully present to the pain or loss, or fighting the urge to run away and not be present at all.

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For years I’ve wrestled with God over the slippery problem of time. 

Me: Why can't we pause the good moments to make them last longer or fast forward the hard moments so they're over more quickly? 

God: This is how I designed it. I designed time to keep moving, for humans to age, for things to come to an end. Now trust me that this is the best way even if you can’t understand it.

“There is a time for everything,
 and a season for every activity under the heavens:”

-Ecclesiastes 3:1

Sometimes I’m able to take him at his word and trust him. I’m able to find comfort in the fact that unlike me, he can zoom out and view the entire timeline of the human race and it’s better that we live within his design rather than mine.

At other times, thinking about the people and seasons of life that are gone forever makes my breath seize in my chest. In these moments I don’t want to be wise or grow more mature, I’d rather God build me a time machine so I can go back and curl up on a couch with my kids or visit my Dad again or go back to the infinity of first falling in love with my husband. 

I don’t have any tidy conclusions to these thoughts, I simply present them to you as they are and I would ask you: How many infinities have you lived through? Are you living through one right now?

Blessings from the Guest Nest,

-Aimee

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Continue the Journey

PODCAST

-Andrew Garfield quoting Spike Jones, on grief

“It's like the landscape gets rearranged. It's like where there was once a hill that you knew really well, there's now like a waterfall. And in the place where the river once was, now there's just desert. And behind you, where your house was. There's a swamp. It's like the world is being re-revealed to you or revealed in a deeper way.”

You might be surprised by how eloquent and heartbreakingly actor Andrew Garfield can talk about love and loss. Check out his interview with Anderson Cooper. He also has a new movie out that captures these themes called We Live in Time.

MOVIE

My favorite movie that deals with time is About Time with Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, and Bill Nighy. If you can get past the spicy language you will find a story that reminds you to live every moment to the fullest.

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