Unstuck

9.1.2022

Thirty-four years, give or take. Full-time. Part-time brings it closer to forty. Eight thirty to five thirty with an hour for lunch, or something like it. Two weeks off a year and a week sick. An additional week a year granted in the last four years of the “career”. It was a living, as they say.

I already can’t remember what it was all about. I traded time for money. Did what they wanted. Even at the time I don’t think I really understood why anyone would pay all that money for it. I guess money has its own needs.

So now I renegotiate my relationship with time. Remove the company watch. Melt the clock’s face and throw a wrench in the great machine. Maybe I can discover a new pace, a new rhythm, a cadence for my hours and days not dictated by money but by curiosity and passion. Synch my heartbeat with the sun and the moon. Guide my actions by the ebb and flow of the tides and seasons. Maybe I will come unstuck like Billy Pilgrim in Schlachthof Fünf. Would that be bad? Is timelessness a simulacrum of madness?     

If I live as long as my mother, I have another thirteen years. If I make it to the government’s estimated lifespan for a man of my generation, I have about eighteen years to go. If I end up living as long as the oldest known member of my family, I can look forward to a whopping thirty-five years of retirement! There are a number of epidemiological factors that incline me to think it more likely that my time will tend toward the earlier termination date.

Time, as they say, will tell.