Make time

Light in London one afternoon in October 2006

Stephen King’s commencement speech to my Vassar class was a good one. His message, that “you can’t take it with you,” never left me. Every year since I try to do more with, and waste less of, what I’ve got. The efforts aren’t always successful. I’ve spent a lot of time playing games and goofing off, and a lot of time on skills I don’t always need. Mostly, here half way through my forty second year, I’ve spent a lot of time.

My grandfather, on the phone a few weeks back, just eighty seven, said “I never expected to be this old.” The line echoed in my head all week. Who does? And yet underneath the statement is the simple math, that he is more than twice as old as I am now. We have time, or we could have time, if we’re lucky and healthy and work hard at making more of both.

“You said you needed time, and you had time,” Ani sings on a song Tara’s been learning to play. We do, I think, though never as much as we’d like, not with the people we most want it with. I think of the methods, of the sums. Half hour phone calls, hour long video chats, and text strings that cover years, that drop for days and re-emerge with new questions, new thoughts for that friend from years ago. Mostly I think about the good days, about the long weekend in Amsterdam with a friend I’d met in Tokyo. It was after the World Cup in 2006, and we spent the weekend relaxing and wandering the canals. I think about how there are no pictures of that weekend, how without both of us to remember, I’d have forgotten it entirely by now.

From October of that same year there are photos, somewhere, of our time in London together, of our brief wanderings as I jammed more travel into a busy year. In those photos we are young, and happy, and as unfinished as anyone in their late twenties can look. We are still en route to so much, still before so much.

Life, it seems, is like that. There’s never a sense of how far we have to go, only of how far we’ve been. Sitting on the floor of our office in Hong Kong on a Sunday, writing while Tara chops ume for pickles, I think of how lucky we were to have folk visit before travel stopped. How despite all the urging we did, we probably didn’t do enough. Because there might not be time, after. The world is here, now. Or it was, and, vaccines done, we hope it will be again. I’m getting ready, on these quiet weekends of chores and writing, for whatever’s next. Getting ready to move again, to act again, and to be part of other people’s lives again. It’s been a while.

We said we needed time, like Ani sings. Have we had time?

Until tomorrow

First, when given freedom, we meet friends, we meet new people, we gather groups and hike new paths to new rocks. We work to keep each other safe, to help each other up, new fingers on old routes. These gatherings are peaceful, everyone united in joy to be outside by the sea with raw fingers and sore toes. We share pads and water, snacks and tips for surviving, for getting to the top. In many ways climbing, during these last few months of lockdown, has replaced frisbee as our source of friends, though of course many faces are the same, like us moving between activities depending on season, weather, and level of quarantine. Together we try new things and learn to take joy in small steps, in getting something the second time out, or third. We learn the best way to each spot and the best place to put pads on the ground. We learn how to spot, and hope not to fall enough to need much. And then we hike back, when our fingers are raw, when the sun starts to set, when we run out of energy for pulling.

And then, showered, gear away, fed, I start to prepare for the week to come. I do laundry, and make notes for our Monday morning management meeting. I pick up the bedroom and pay bills, I clean up my desk and my desktop. And finally, ready but not yet ready to sleep, I read fiction and write. The cat, happy to have the bouldering pad back, stretches out on it to claim ownership, and naps. We are happy to be here together, resting in the slow hours of the week’s end. We enjoy each other’s company, the house quiet save for some tunes, save for the washer’s thrum and the tick tack of my typing.

It’s a good life, here, with space to breathe and time to before sleep to turn over some of the things I’d forgotten. Answering personal emails after a week’s delay, or checking on things I’d meant to research, is a good way to close down, to wrap up, and to feel human again. We need these hours, I think, as a buffer, as a way to be who we were, before jobs, before friends houses or beers on Friday, before de-stressing, before stressing, before a task list. We need these hours on Sunday evenings to remember where we were headed, and who we were hoping to be.

The person we meant to be

Runner at night on a Hong Kong track, with city behind

I write a lot, or I think a lot, about the difference between the person we are and the person we meant to be. This gap changes over time, and can be between our hopes, or between our actions. This sentence could read “my hopes”, rather than “our hopes”. I think, though, that these differences are common, are true for most of us.

One of the quotes I repeat most, both on this site and in daily life, is Jan Chipchase’s “the distance between who you are and who you might be is closing”. It’s succinct, and encapsulates so much of the fear of getting older and the challenges of relationships. We are all so far from who we hoped to be, and yet we are running out of time.

Mostly I think about who we said we would be, when we started a relationship. When we were first dating, first flirting, and trying hard to be the best version of ourselves, to convince both our now partner and our then self that we were as good as we could be, as we hoped to be. I think about this version of myself, aged twenty eight, was working his first real job, managing people, traveling, spending hours on his blackberry on bus rides to cold Chinese factory towns. This boy wanted to quit his job and move somewhere with central heat, wanted to move somewhere with blue skies, wanted to write. He wrote, he studied, and he wanted to do more. He wanted to learn, to put out, to create.

In the intervening years he has done that, the boy I used to be. He’s written dozens of letters, hundreds of posts, and several drafts of a novel. He’s written journals and filled notebooks with Chinese characters. He’s grown in other ways as well, learned new industries, new cities, and new sports. He has met so many people, and tried with each introduction to be a little more of the person he wishes to be and a little less of the person he wants to leave behind. He tries to be more curious, and less judgmental. He wants to be more open, and less sure.

In relationships there is an art to letting one’s partner make these changes. The trick is to make space for growth without expecting it, without demanding it. People don’t change, and we should never expect them to. But when they do, when they move past what’s comfortable to a new reaction or a new choice we should be ready to embrace them there, to welcome this change.

When bored, be it in Saitama in 2002, San Francisco in 2010, or Hong Kong in the lockdown days of 2020, I run. In the park, on a track, on a road. Whatever. It’s a habit born out of boredom and the inability to sit still. But because I am a person who does not like to run, neither do my friends. And so, one morning this year, when I said “I’m bored, I’m going to go for a run,” and my partner said “I’ll come,” I had the perfect opportunity to react how I hope to.

The easy snark, of “Oh really, but you hate to run,” is death in this phase, when someone’s trying hard to do a new thing.

“Great, I’m getting changed, 10 minutes?” I said.

And so we build a bridge together to the people we both want to be. It was fun, running together in the park, walking back sweaty and tired. A new kind of fun, for people who are still trying to close that gap.

My partner tells me she’ll be ready when I decide to cook. Meanwhile she’s happy making dinner, figuring out new recipes that I might like. It’s love, in the best form.

With low light

My favorite time of day is the first quiet hour of morning, when the house is still dark, shades drawn, and even the cat would like to go back to bed.

One room of our house has windows on three sides, with shades we rarely close. This room, used for yoga, for storage, for guests, and for laundry, is where I spend the mornings, after making coffee in the dark of the kitchen. I love the transition from the quiet shadows of the bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen to the open space of this room, to the view of Hong Kong and the sounds of the city waking. I love the light colors of morning, before the sun is beaming in, before the heat rises.

And then, of course, I love the transition back into the rest of the apartment. Coffee drunk I love stepping back into the dark of sleeping hours to slowly prepare myself for the day, to wake the house as much as I have woken myself. I try to do these things without urgency, the cleaning of cat box and dish, the laundry folding, the putting away of yesterday’s dishes. I try to keep the stillness and calm of those first few minutes even as the street noises get louder, even as the work hours draw closer.

I know why people meditate in the morning, when life is still. I know why they do yoga early, or run. There’s a lot of peace and less exhaustion than there will be later on. These moments without distraction, without external demands or personal hopes, are precious.

I do my shoulder PT in this room with grey light, before waking Tara. And write. And step back into the darkness to move on with the day.

The future of the future

Shinjuku South exit stairs

…Will still contain the past,

Her voice cuts in over the bouncing beat, that late nineties sound. I am walking through the warren of small streets around Sheung Wan station, and then up the steps through old Hong Kong. I am instantly instead walking through Saitama late at night in the cool rain of the autumn of two thousand two. I am twenty three, in a dress shirt, alone, and the world feels perfect, made just for me. In the distance I can see the elevated Saikyo line, my house on the other side. Behind me, almost invisible until a train passes, is the Kehin-Tohoku line. These suburban streets are quiet in the rain, and the folk I’d left in Kita Urawa are now far behind. I walk in a bubble of happiness and music, temporarily free from every bond.

Memories are fragile things, and they disappear for long periods, buried under more recent times, only to be brought back in an instant. The places that shaped me are never truly gone, and memories of entire evenings, commutes, and relationships are pulled back with the music that shaped those hours.

I have been obsessed with early Tokyo memories lately. I’d thought them a strange product of late-pandemic seclusion, of missing travel, of being so glad to have spent my fortieth birthday in Tokyo with friends from all over. The pull of places we could not visit, I thought, of favorite memories that were temporarily out of reach. Instead, suddenly, halfway up the 200 stairs of my morning commute, I am in the middle of a Tokyo evening, waiting for a someone overlooking the stairs of Shinjuku’s south exit. In my memory it was cold, or not. The weather, strangely, is hard to picture, having been overwritten by hundreds of days in the same spot. This is the effect of being shaped by places, and by music.

A colleague, a friend, gave me Amplified Heart my first year in Tokyo, back when passing albums was a thing, when recording minidiscs of other people’s CDs was the way we shared. I remember starting to rip CD’s in Tokyo, to that very first iPod, bought in Omiya for most of a paycheck. I remember pirating software from the stores with firewire cables. I remember so many things, at least sometimes.

It’s packed at two am,
are you on your own

On a rare foggy Hong Kong evening I walk down the hill after work, through Soho and Central. People are alive, moving with the energy of evening, with the sense of somewhere to be. There are people everywhere, and I feel at home, part of a crowd going many places, going nowhere together. Often I write in the abstract, of groups and emotions. Partially I’m afraid of the details, of writing the specifics of memory into history, of trying to give shape to moments that seemed so important and finding them hard to make out in the larger motions of my life. Partially though it’s because many of the details are abstract, my memory is lost in a crowd of people I can barely talk to, carried emotionally on the words sung by an English woman decades earlier.

In many ways moving to pedestrian-friendly Asian cities in my twenties is the defining change of my life. The songs that I’ve spent the past two decades wandering them to, then, echo instantly with memories of evenings long lost to time, with friends distant enough to likewise need assistance recalling.

For a boy who had spent his early teen years at ska shows, his late teen years quoting Ani lyrics, and his college years speaker hugging through late night raves to the heyday of jungle, Tokyo’s second hand CD shops and rental stores, coupled with the minidisc and mp3, meant access to music in a depth impossible before. Mostly though, colleagues and friends took him clubbing and gave him tunes.

I use my walkman when I walk,
and I don’t talk,
but later on the moment’s gone
and I don’t get it.

Twenty years later, in the second pandemic spring, I spend a month walking to work every day to Everything but the Girl. These albums, Amplified Heart, Temperamental, and Walking Wounded, have been the background for so much of my life. Amplified Heart itself is the background for so much of our marriage, is the only album we own on vinyl, is the album I want most in the world.

I remember the conversation, a Canadian teacher on the train, older and wiser in a lot of ways, to that boy of twenty two. The week prior she had changed my year with the Dirty Vegas disc, with Days Go By. A week later she was ready to change my life.

“If you like that I think you’d like Everything but the Girl. Amplified Heart.”

Like almost every day we were on the train platform in Kawaguchi, were heading home at nine thirty pm, shift over. Like every day we were tired and looking forward to the commute, to headphone time, to not having to talk any more. And yet we were awake, alive, part of the sprawling megacity we both loved so much.

“It’s just so emotional,” she said, a turn of phrase both personal to her and globally correct.

Months later I would ride the train to Temperamental, leaning against the window of the elevated Saikyo line, dreaming of clubbing, dreaming of Shinjuku on that same ride home. The Saikyo line is one of Tokyo’s busiest commuter lines, leaving late from Shibuya and Shinjuku, touching down at Ikebukero before becoming elevated and pulling away from the city through Akabane and across the river into Sataima, out into the short lands, into the streets of my memories.

And the light goes down,
and all the lights come on,
and they call to me,
oh come on come on

Quoted lyrics from Everything but the Girl’s ‘The Future of the Future’, ‘Lullaby of Clubland’, and ‘Low Tide of the Night’ from the 1999 album Temperamental