Time Has Come Today

There are moments you wish had a longer lifespan.  The glimpse of a sunset when the balance of pink and purple and gold shed a completely different light on the familiar.  The song and dance of toddlers in that happy serendipity of harmony and joy.  A conversation with a kindred soul. A good cup of coffee. 

Maybe their value is in the fleeting.  Or maybe the promise that another moment of similar beauty and value can be found again… or not.  But the present is real enough and the future is possible.

I try to write of a moment like this in one of my manuscripts. The moment between hope and despair of falling in love, where one realizes as Iris Murdoch once wrote “that something other than oneself is real.”  This is particularly significant to my characters, who were taken as children into the Land of the Sidhe – a world that isn’t real.  But that moment, that very human moment is authentic and provokes my heroine to want to leave that mystical paradise to find her humanity and the seconds of possibility.

The catch is the moment doesn’t last.  But time is different in that land of the Sidhe.  It can be manipulated and distorted along with the reality.  I’ve created a mythos in the background (mostly it is just in my head right now) that as they chase that chance, they are not beholden to the consequences of time (age, sickness, boredom) but can move through the passing of history and witness how time changes everything and nothing.

Because that is the other perspective of time.  We want those intense, miniscule moments to linger but can’t broaden our view to understand the larger picture of time passing and healing or breaking or improving or losing.  We are impatient for immediacy and don’t appreciate the accumulated power of small actions or the eventual point of continued work towards a goal.

Like they sing in Hamilton - It’s not a moment.  It’s a movement.

My characters land in parts of history where the movements are large.  The American Revolution.  World War I.  The 1960s.  The Troubles.  The Confederate Wars of Ireland. And not so large, but with significant ripples.  The influx of Irish and the accompanying violence in the 1840s.  The Industrial Golden Age.  The most recent decade… which when I started this writing seemed a little less volatile compared with these other parts of history.  That has yet to play out, but it is still subject to when the beauty of the here and now get lost and the pursuit of that moment is overtaken by the fever of winning history.

I guess this juxtaposition has been in my mind for two years now.  One complete manuscript.  One sort of half completed manuscript.  A shell of a third and multiple outlines, notes, brain dumps later.  But I found myself in a moment as I walked from the door to the office to my car this evening.  The sweetness of the thaw with enough crispness of winter still in the air.  The sunset just starting as the five o’clock hour met the halfway point.  

Thinking of a few minutes I wished lasted longer in the last few days and some to which I was glad to bid good night.  But it was real and warm and alive, despite all the chaos in the larger picture.

And then I remembered what I’ve been writing these last two years.  And why now more than any other time of significance, I have to keep writing.