Time, Relations and the Shape of a Life
On turning sixty-five, on Ged in Earthsea, and on why a life is less a road than a field of continuing relations.
At 65 I can feel time beginning to come to a conclusion.
That does not mean I think I am about to die, nor that I spend my days contemplating death. But the boundary is visible in a way it was not when I was thirty-five. There is less pretending that life is indefinitely extensible. Retirement appears somewhere ahead. I wonder what other stages there might be: grandchildren perhaps, another kind of work, time simply to think. And yet I have had periods of my life when I had time to think, so I am not especially hungry for leisure. What I do not want is to become old, bent, ill and lonely. Of those, loneliness and illness frighten me most.
There is something in A Wizard of Earthsea that has stayed with me. Ged is not tempted by eternal life because a life without a beginning and an end would lose something of its intensity. It is the boundary that gives the thing its shape. I think I understand that more now. It does not make me less frightened of death. But it makes me want to inhabit this part of my life properly: to stay fit, to remain healthy, to love, to think, to be interested. Nothing seems completely inevitable except, perhaps, death.
This is where time begins to connect for me with relational theory.
We normally imagine ourselves moving through time as though there were a stable person travelling down a road: the child becomes the young man, who becomes the middle-aged man, who becomes the old man. But that is not quite how I experience myself. My study of psychosynthesis has influenced this. The person I was at twenty or thirty-five has not disappeared. He remains an aspect of me. What he learned, the skills he acquired, the mistakes he made, the ideas he held and the relationships he entered are continuously in relationship with the person I am now.
All that is and was of you is you.
That does not mean the past remains unchanged. Quite the opposite. Time seems continually to alter its meaning.
My divorces taught me this painfully. Looking backwards, it is easy to put on rose-tinted spectacles and remember the tenderness while forgetting the periods when anger, ego and an inability to understand one another took over. It is equally easy to do the reverse and allow the ending to contaminate everything that came before it. Neither seems truthful.
What remains with me most strongly is a feeling I know to some extent to be my children's, and which became my own: that I will never have a home again. Not a house - a home, in the sense of an unquestioned place inside a family that continues.
Divorce did not simply end a relationship. It broke a continuity. A shared past that had seemed to be travelling naturally towards a shared future suddenly stopped. The person was lost, but so was the family in that form, the history we had made together and the version of myself who existed inside it. You grieve all of those things.
Time does not abolish that grief. A broken relationship is a wound. It may heal, but it leaves scar tissue, and you live with the scar. Eventually you realise that you have become something like a body made from growth and scars. Yet even that description risks separating the scar from the person. There is no untouched self underneath it all. The wound, the healing, the growth and the mark it leaves are all part of the whole.
Relationships do this to us constantly, usually on a smaller scale.
I once knew a woman who always used a particular kind of hairbrush. I use that kind of hairbrush to this day. It is an absurdly ordinary thing, but perhaps that is precisely why it matters. She is still present in me. Not metaphorically present as some ghost from the past, but materially present in a habit of my hand and in an object I continue to choose.
All my relationships have created me in this way.
Some leave language, some habits, some wounds, some confidence, some fear. A relationship may last fifty years or a few months and still enter the structure of the person who continues beyond it. Its importance may not change with time, but its meaning can.
This makes me wonder whether our usual picture of time is wrong. Perhaps relationships do not merely occur in time, as though time were an empty container into which we place them. A relation occurs in a moment, certainly, but then it develops as we develop. Twenty years later I am no longer the person who first entered it, and yet that earlier person remains in relation with me. The relationship itself is therefore not entirely where I left it either.
The future works strangely too. I am not sure that some imagined seventy-five-year-old version of me draws me towards him. But the person I do not want to become certainly acts upon me now. The possibility of becoming isolated, sick, physically diminished or bored affects how I live at sixty-five. A future that does not yet exist is already participating in the present.
And perhaps this is why intimacy matters so much to me. The richest periods of my life have been relational ones: the desire to know another person, and to be known. Quaker Advices and Queries uses a phrase I have always loved: to "know one another in the things which are eternal."
I have perhaps known one or two people like that.
The relationships did not thereby escape time. Some ended. Loss remained loss and had to be grieved. But something passed between us that entered who I became.
So I no longer think of my life simply as sixty-five years accumulated behind me with some unknown quantity remaining ahead. It feels more like a field of continuing relations: between the people I have loved and the person I became through loving them; between the child, young man and older man who are all somehow still here; between memory and its changing meaning; between the future I fear and the present choices that fear produces.
Perhaps time does not simply carry us away from what has been.
Perhaps it is the medium through which relations continue to make us.
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