Seconds

I like January.

I’ve had a really good January this year. I have been, with varying degrees of success, working to cut my time on social media to a minimum. A certain amount of integration with the central brain is required in order to avoid too many phone calls *wink wink* and I find it funny how many memes I see about the 75th day of January so far, and the first 3 months of January, stuff like that. It makes less sense to me than the dreaded Mondays; Mondays used to be awful, but that was all before I lost track of time.

A friend of mine used to say, “Thirteen years of school teaches you little else than to be on time for work.” or something like that. It’s not strictly true, at least I don’t think so, but what do I know, I was home schooled. It’s pretty hard to be late for school when the whole family goes downstairs after breakfast to recite the pledges and get to the business of learning, but what else are you going to do with your day?

I like school, I think I always did. It’s all the knowledge that’s so attractive. I can see why people become career students, besides the fact that you don’t have to enter the ‘work force’(like it’s an army or something), but it’s not like studenting is easy, strictly, just like not all work is drudging for ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’ or whatever inimical entity you’ve placed above yourself that steals all of your essence.

I like work, too; I always did. And it pisses me off that I never liked myself enough to take care of my body to the degree that my work life was sustainable. Sometimes. It’s hard to accept that you can’t do what you’ve staked your life on, which is what happens when your career ends, when that road reaches it’s terminus, when the second hand ticks over into January, and then just keeps going because that’s all it does, and we gripe about the fact that it’s not December, that it’s not the second it was two seconds ago. Three. Four. They keep passing.

Losing track of time is a luxury akin to sobriety in that, in the early stages, you tend to feel like you’ve frivolously spent your entire life, and that there was nothing good to come out of all the years that went before, and that everything was wasted, like your entire past existence happened in that last flash of a second’s regret, and all you did was fuck up. If you’re lucky, you’re only half right, but it’s not a good idea to remain in that mindset any longer than it takes to plot a course out of it, because you have better things to do.

Punctuality, if you think about it in a certain way, doesn’t have anything to do with the clock. The word itself means of a point, and the point is to come together with other humans to get things accomplished. I don’t think that necessarily means get busy and be productive, getting things done can be nothing more than being with. Do you ever just do that? Be with? It’s nice, but if we are talking about work, or school, or meeting for boardgames, or a reading group, or at the gym, then the point of showing up on time is proving that you understand the reason to be there well enough, not to go ‘out of your way’, but to be the way because someone is counting on you besides you, and that’s a good thing.

In the book A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester describes well the social conditions of what we now call The Dark Ages, or medieval period, which was the span of time between the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 until The beginning of the Renaissance in about the mid-fifteenth century. A large part of the reason that they were so “dark” is that so few people knew where anyone else was, and even fewer knew how to write about it. Generations of people spent their entire lives scratching their existence from the ground without any knowledge of what was going on in the world outside their tiny enclaves. If, as happened often, a stranger on a horse came to collect someone to go to war for them, even if it wasn’t too far away, they’d usually never make it back home, because no one knew where they were in reference to anywhere else. The vast majority of the population of Europe spent a thousand years eating turnips, sleeping on infested beds, being grimy, and having little use for even so much as a name.

Everything has a price, and being part of a community is no exception. The church bells of the local monastery or church were instrumental in the maintenance, or creation, of community during the middle ages. They created hubs to which the local troglodytes could come and share their turnips(I don’t know, when I think of the medieval times, I think of turnips for some reason), and listen to someone tell stories, and see someone read, and meet their neighbours, and know what day it was, and hear the news from outside their small small world. What a wonder that must have been.

Religion, taken from Latin, means to bind. It’s a good thing, this binding, this bringing together, this community. We need it. We don’t need religion at all anymore, or massive governance; there are so many other, better ways for community to be built that we no longer require these wheels of stone that once pulled us out of the dark, and now keep us there, bound and indebted, and owing our souls. There are better ways to live.

Stop complaining, work hard, get a hobby, read a book, join a club, find a new job, forgive people, be weird, be humble, tell the truth, don’t waste, your time.

Live a good life.

I love you.