Floating on a Moment

It's always been my work — professionally, personally — to make a story out of things. But there is freedom in letting go of the through line.

I’m letting go of seeing life as a road with a “behind me” and an “ahead of me.”

I’m a pretty adventurous cook. I get an idea in my head and decide to pursue it, because “Gee, I wonder how that works” will never not be a pathway I follow. So I’ve made some ridiculously complicated dishes. One New Year’s Eve, when I lived (briefly) in San Francisco, I made individual poussin pot pies, with a cognac cream sauce, and served them in tiny pumpkins topped with pastry that I decorated with pastry pumpkin leaves and vine tendrils. When I served it to my friends, one of them gasped and said, “For me?”

Yes, of course it was for her, because I love being able to serve people delight. But it was also very much for me. These kind of efforts, I’ve come to understand over the years, are a way of inviting myself to be really, truly present and set aside whatever central agony I am currently building my life around. I remember almost every aspect of making those pot pies — going to the big Williams Sonoma and buying a massive (and breathtakingly expensive), green Le Creuset dutch oven; looking for the poussin; trimming the baby haricots verts; knocking on my downstairs neighbor’s door to ask if I could possibly cook two of my pumpkins in his oven, because I could only fit four in mine — as if it were just a year or three ago, instead of 25 years ago.

And what I am starting to see and understand is, by engaging with these moments —which I can pull up like those ViewMaster “reels” from childhood, the little circular cardboard photo sets featuring 12 images of, say, animals from the African veldt — little by little I am changing my relationship to time.

I used to think of time as relentlessly linear and requiring a clear future vision: “I can dream up where I want to go, and then define what I have to do to get there.” I was an extremely over-ambitious child (and teenager, and young adult….), which has its roots in my family’s pathology (a story for another day). And honestly, I don’t understand how I ever had any friends because I was constantly nattering on about all the incredible achievements I would make and all the amazing things I would do. It charmed the teachers, but I remember feeling distinctly Other in high school because of that ambition: I knew I wanted to go to New York City and become a magazine editor, which I guess seemed, oh, insane and highfalutin and ridiculous. (I’m old enough now to also know that teenager brains are unreliable narrators, but I also know I literally never shut up about all my big, exciting plans for myself and must have been insufferable.)

I had PLACES TO GO and THINGS TO DO and my god, get out of my way!

Time was currency to be spent on the way to somewhere better and more fulfilling.

I feel really, really differently about all that now.

We — meaning Americans, Westerners — turn time into a linear experience: the past is behind us, today is right now, and the future stretches ahead. We “face the future” (forward), we “look back” (at history, at memories), and some of us try to do our best to be mindfully present in the here in now, however briefly we can achieve that in our achievement-oriented culture.

In other cultures, the future is behind us, because we can’t see it, and the past lies before us, because we know its story. THINK ABOUT THAT SHIFT! When I read about this in a recent New Yorker article I got so excited I almost cried. I spent so much of my life’s energy trying to bend the arc of time to my will and my desires — to write the story of what would come next for me, to imagine the payoff for my hard work and focus. Yes, drive has its place, as does some planning, but…

I spent more than 10 years in extreme grief about the end of magazine publishing as a career — not because I couldn’t survive the end of magazines as I knew it, but because I didn’t find a new home for myself, career-wise. I tortured myself a little bit. I was furious I hadn’t solved the problem of what to be when I grow up. (Most people have to figure that out young — I had the great good luck to know exactly what I wanted to be, to do that, and then have to figure out what to do for a living at midlife!) These were my constant thought companions: “Why haven’t found my pivot?” “I messed this up.” “I didn’t figure out what my next move was.” “Everyone else made smarter decisions than I did.” “Why am I struggling?” “How did I fuck this up for myself?” Of course, the related financial insecurity only served to heighten those judgments.

But in these years of despair and worry (and trying to Fill in the Blanks), I did manage to slow down time for myself in brief moments: usually moments in the garden (as anyone who follows me on Instagram knows), or on long walks with nothing playing in my ears, or when I’m in the kitchen, cooking.

My beloved gently teases me because all my meals that I make for myself are a 7-condiment affair. I eat homemade baked falafel pretty frequently — and that comes with tzatziki, tahini dressing, olives, za’atar-dusted pita, a romaine salad with feta and peppers, etc. etc., just as one example. I always take the extra steps that add more flavor, say, toasting the walnuts for a salad, or pulling sliced garlic out of the oil I plan to cook the broccolini in so it doesn’t burn (and adding it back at the end of the cooking). He is eternally frustrated that I am always just four minutes away from finishing up my meal preparations while he and the kids are at the table and serving themselves. (Admission: I opt to eat differently than the family some evenings, cuz I finally decided I don’t need to eat fish sticks and spaghetti and meatballs just because the kids are.) So when he was prodding me about this one night recently, I paused and turned to him and said, “But this is the best part of my day. I’m paying attention to me. I enjoy this. This is the opposite of work and worry. This, to me, is care and luxuriating in daily pleasures. This is life.”

(Ryan has been with me a long time, so my random existential ruminations don’t really surprise him anymore. I think he just said, “Okay, honey” and turned around.)

But for me, that was a serious deep aha! moment. I don’t want to rush through the daily tasks of living, so that I can — what? — have 17 more minutes on the sofa watching TV? (I mean, I would give those extra 17 minutes to Severance every day for the rest of my life happily, but still…)

The cooking is cyclical — memories of meals made come back and layer over each other. I thought about the amazing New Year’s Eve poussin pot pie this New Year’s Eve when I was using that green pot to make bisteeya, a divinely confusing sweet-savory dish I first tasted in Morocco when I was there with one of my longtime besties on one of our trips. Memories laying over memories. My life as a lasagna, not a finish line. “Time is a flat circle” is a phrase I never, ever understood, until this moment. It’s usually used derogatorily — Neitzche’s torturous “eternal return,” where life repeats endlessly — but I’m finding extreme, easy comfort in the way memories overlap and conjure each other, charting a different kind of path, showing me my non-linear life.

Beth Gibbons — the stunning songstress of Portishead of late ‘90s fame — released an album last year and many of the songs are gorgeous lamentations on being somewhere past the midpoint of life. “Floating On a Moment” is one of those songs, and when I was listening to it recently, it led me to thinking about writing this post (which I’m sure is much less cogent than what I’d been striving for — writing about our experience of consciousness has its challenges).

But this is how I think about time now. Not a destination, not a series of goals, not something to be bent into a simple through line: which is, of course, my work — excavating and defining the through line that allows a story to make sense or a brand to have meaning.

For me, personally, I am letting go of the through line of time. Instead, I’m experiencing life more as a series of moments strung together by association. The meals I’ve cooked, yes, but also the different people I’ve been (while always being me), the learnings that layer one upon the other, the delightful return of people and tasks and experiences that I had assumed long gone. This connection to memory (of what’s been) and surprise (of what may come) makes me feel at home in my life in a way that pushing ever-forward did not.

These snapshots are the point, the storyline to hold onto, even if they lay like scattered Polaroids on the floor instead of telling a well-shaped story placed perfectly in a scrapbook.

I now know to seek the everyday wonder, those flashes of deep intuition when I naturally pause and say, “I am here right now. And I have everything I need in this moment.” And file it away to be brought back to me again another day.