Time is a Thief

    How long since I've spent the whole night in a twin bed with a stranger
    His warm arms all around me?
    . . .

    Don't tell me of love everlasting and other sad dreams
    I don't want to hear
    Just tell me of passionate strangers who rescue each other
    From a lifetime of cares

        From “Love Song to a Stranger”
        by Joan Baez


Recently I listened to “Love Song to a Stranger” and, much to my amazement burst into tears. I never spent a night with a stranger, and I'm a firm believer in love everlasting, so I couldn't imagine what the tears were about. Obviously it deserved some thought.

We all know the effect of time on the landscape. New mountains rise up out of the earth tall and jagged, like the Rockies. With the passage of time, lots of time, mountains are smoothed and worn down, the rock converted to soil, until they have a domed appearance and are covered with forest and fields like the southern Appalachians. On a day to day basis the change is invisible, but over a long enough time period the change is dramatic.

I think the word “passionate” is the key to my distress when hearing the song. When I was a child and a teenager I was passionate about a wide variety of things: underwater sports, hiking, camping, Boy Scouts, church, and the wild country in New Hapmshire where my family spent our summers. On that land I built a tree house and then a log cabin. I located the old bits of barbed wire that marked the boundaries of the property and then surveyed it with home made instruments to make a map. When I was seventeen I began a summer job with a hiking club, maintaining trails and shelters, with eleven other young men; we were passionate about our life in the woods and I made friendships in that group which have lasted until today. We shared our passion for the outdoor life not only during summers on the job, but during the rest of the year in visits which included backpacking and skiing trips.

In my early 20's I got over my fear of women and began a series of passionate romances. I think I was experiencing what most people experience in their teens – the highest highs and the lowest lows of beginning, maintaining, and ending relationships. After a few years I began a romance with the woman who became my wife, and it was a passionate relationship. The passion was not only about lust, but about every aspect of our approach to life as we worked to figure out whether we could build a life together. We passionately discussed table settings, curtains and drapes, how to raise children, the “meaning” of plays and movies we saw together,  whether to take vacations at the seashore or in the mountains, and on and on and on.

In college I had become passionate about computer programming, and my first jobs after college were in this field. It was not unusual for my colleagues and I to work late into the night when we got caught up by a challenging programming problem; we were too involved to take a break until we were successful. Often our managers, who lived in a 8 to 5 world, didn't know how to deal with these bursts of energy and the sleeping until midmorning or later which inevitably followed.

In my early 30's I was involved in the design of computer communication systems. My role often was to help groups of engineers with differing opinions reach agreement. I could see that what we were doing was important; we were breaking new ground with the systems we designed. I was passionate about the work, and was willing to invest an extraordinary amount of my time and energy in finding solutions that everyone involved could accept.

Just as time wears down mountains, as I look back I can see that time has worn down my passions. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I no longer stay up all night trying to solve a problem. I didn't see it occurring, but my relationship with my wife is now “comfortable” rather than passionate; we compromise quickly rather than battle intensely. The world that I worked in has changed and moved on; the system solutions I cared so much about are now part of history. So I believe my tears were for the realization that I'm unlikely to ever again experience the highs and lows of strong passions. Time has smoothed my edges and passion has gone. Now that I'm confronted with this effect of time, I'm amazed that I didn't see it happening. Time is a thief!

Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in March 2015.  The assignment was to write on the topic "Time".