Time is never as slippery as it is in the space between October and December. The Kentucky heat of late summer clings to the fall until suddenly, I can see my breath in the air during my morning walks. We reset our clocks so the dark comes earlier but leaves sooner, and we define time holiday by holiday. Every year, we’re shocked at how fast it all passes.
It’s easy to blame the erratic behavior of autumn weather and the sudden arrival of the cold, but it’s more than that. The reason time seems to jump is that we’re only noticing it at the points where we bother to look up.
Touching grass is a phrase that actually has very little to do with grass. It mainly means taking a break from technology and going outside, but that feels too narrow.
Touching grass is the intentional choice to recognize the vastness of the world that exists outside our brain and beyond our fingertips.
Media likes to tell us that awareness of the world is gained through the constant consumption of news about events happening in our backyard and thousands of miles away. The claim is that the internet makes us more aware of the world. In reality, it makes us more aware of the events in the world – primarily the horrific ones – and it keeps our heads down and our minds occupied.
Awareness of the world is education – staying informed. The issue is that when we consume media in the twenty-first century, we are trying to catch water from Niagara Falls with a plastic beach bucket.
We were never meant to know everything that is happening everywhere in the world every day.
We cannot carry that.
Whether it be news sources, podcasts, or social media, these sources, when gone unchecked, take more from us than they give.
Our attention has become a commodity for corporations to profit off of. Jenny Odell, author of “How to Do Nothing,” refers to these media as “[capitalizing] on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them.”
Our attention is spread between all these things, the good and the bad, meaning that the things that are meant to be life-giving suffer. When our attention is limited, even these good things can become just another siphon of our attention.
Humans are designed in a funny way where we only have direct insight into our own experience, which means that it is easy to be overcome by it. Work, school, interpersonal relationships, all these things on our best days give us meaning and paralyze us on our worst days.
Typically, my response when any one or more of these pieces of my life goes awry is to isolate and turn up the external noise that drowns out the icky parts of my internal experience. Unsurprisingly, this exact behavior does nothing to help me feel more rooted or better equipped to handle a situation.
Recently, I’ve realized that the most helpful thing when my life is falling apart is looking at my cat as he snores at the foot of my bed, blissfully unaware that the person who puts food in his bowl is in the midst of a meltdown. He looks at me and stares confused because, so long as I remember to feed him, this stress does not influence how he lives. This could be incredibly discouraging, yet somehow, it’s freeing.
That’s the thing: touching grass isn’t just going outside and sitting under a tree. It is the freeing acknowledgment that my experience does not constitute the end of the world.
Even outside of deep emotional distress, after working on a project for six hours straight, it is nice to come up for air and remember that there is a whole world outside of the Word document I have been staring at all day.
The irony is that taking a step outside of our experience tends to deepen it. It makes us more aware of both the world around us and the small details that can slip between the cracks of our thoughts and feelings.
I like my morning walks because they are some of the rare moments where I feel connected to the passing of time. I’ve started writing down the weather at the end of every day and pinpointing the exact day when it starts feeling like fall. Then, later, on the first day, I had the urge to put on Christmas music.
I don’t want to lose sight of the world around me. I don’t want to be shocked by the movement of time. I want to shake hands with time as it passes.