Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Natural world evokes the return of our sense
• Money, politics corrupt language, but we don't have to listen
• Our mountains in winter is one place where human language fails

....for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping

with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway,

or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-- William Butler Yeats

Meaning takes time.

This struck me one night shoveling snow and listening to "All Things Considered."

National Public Radio's Robert Krulwich was exploring the human experience of "time." Specifically, why does time seem to pass by faster with age?

"Because we are multitasking," I figured he'd say. "Listening to the news while shoveling snow, so that we do not fully experience either one."

I reckoned I should turn off the radio and pay attention to the raw, fresh air; the sunset-pink, deep-freeze landscape; the chunky chopping noises. Or just pitch the shovel in a snowbank and go inside to hear the news!

But multitasking was not targeted, so I had to keep digging.

Duke University neurology professor Warren Meck suggested that as we age, our brain operates more slowly. Twelve minutes would thus feel like eight, or one year like eight months.

"But a year feels like one month," I thought, dinking away at a wall of ice.

The theory didn't sound right to me because, during times of creative "flow," for the young or old, the mind seems to blaze, fast as a flame. By the time one looks up and remembers what year it is, hours have been consumed -- whoosh -- like straw in a bonfire.

Another neuroscientist, David Eagleman of Baylor University, suggested alternatively that when young, we find everything "new." The brain notices newness with great detail, creating a richness that makes novel events, upon retrospection, seem slow and "dense."

But (I thought, sitting on a snowbank to breathe) kids experience the dragging of time in the present, not just in retrospect.

And what about monotony, rather than novelty, causing time to "slow"?

Some friends of mine work in a factory where time seems to drag throughout the repetitive, never-new workday. This would seem to counter Eagleman's theory.

Moreover, I remembered how, years ago, one career plant employee went to the beach for three days and saw the ocean for the first time. It was so utterly new, stunning, vast and alive, she told a group of friends, she cried. Yet time there flew -- much faster than in the factory where nothing ever changed.

The next year, she returned to that beach for a week of pilgrim solitude, and knowing how rapidly time had vanished before, prayed that God would slow down the days. She later reported with amazement, an eternity had seemed to open up, full and unhurried.

Moreover, she told her Sunday school class, though that time is "gone," she can still experience standing on the shore at dawn, gulls crying overhead, frothy pink and silver-green surf booming -- even on the dreariest of factory days. She carries that time "inside."

What kind of time is that? Internal? E-ternal? NPR didn't mention it. But it triggers my own hunch about why "outward" linear time scoots by faster each year.

Carl Jung said that in the first half of life, the eye was turned mainly "outward," learning the ropes and skills of the sensible world. In the second half, an eye could turn inward, to a realm of soul, integration and wisdom. One began living in two worlds.

To my mind, these seem more like two levels of one world. The image that emerges for me is one of fishing boats.

In early years, one's boat skims along the surface, pulling a fairly empty net. By the middle years, the net is full of what it's gone through: live fish and seaweed, busted cooler foam and pearls, blue bottles and bones. Treasures are here, if the boater can pause to sort through this heavy haul instead of constantly hurrying ahead, seeking more.

It takes time to delve down vertically. But whether one does or doesn't, the deep "drag" is there, impeding the boat's ability to skim rapidly along. Hence, everything on the surface appears to pass relatively faster.

Yet the surface is not disjoined from the substrata, to my mind. Certainly everything I see now seems connected to a deeper world. Just one walk up the ridge at twilight seems to evoke a whole universe from "below," a deeper, richer, time-steeped realm than any particular surface event -- yet not separate from that surface.

I finally "get" why Emerson called the whole universe "emblematic," and philosopher Alan Watts believed everything in life "significant" -- a sign of something "beyond."

But to connect sign to meaning, local to beyond, seen to unseen -- takes "time." Maybe that's one reason it will rarely be covered by an evening news report -- and why this column barely grazes the surface.

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.