“Are you still writing?” my husband asks, poking his head in the basement door.

“Huh?  Yeah.  I thought you had to go to work.”

“Um…”  Long pause.  “I did.  I’m back.”

I’ve ceased to be shocked at these conversations.  Fortunately, so has my husband.  The literistic time dilation John discussed a few posts ago is real, although the idea isn’t quite complete.  For example, at the point where my husband brings me back to “normal” time, I typically become aware one indicator that time has passed for me. Basic bodily functions have continued, and so … bathroom.

I’m not a physicist like John.  I wish I were, because the limits of human perception fascinates me, and physics plays at the edge of it – beyond the edge in many cases.  Perhaps I missed my calling.  I spent last night awake, with my mind fixated on the nature of space-time, on randomness, and on how theories beyond our perception can be proven.  With these sort of thoughts, the interminable night zipped by. Time dilated and contracted simultaneously.  Time is tricky that way.  Contradictory.  Incoherent.

Here’s another dilation and contraction of time.  I’ve known John Brewer my whole life.  Surely I have.  But guess what?  One year ago, I barely knew him at all.  In fact, just over one year ago he was reading the draft of a novel of mine for the first time.  And I was terrified because I knew the story had problems I couldn’t identify and I suspected John would.   I wasn’t disappointed.

But that risk in letting him read it was a life changing event.  John believed in me and taught me more than I knew I didn’t know.  He made me a real writer.  But…I’ve always been a writer, just like I’ve always known John.  So it couldn’t have been only a year ago.  Right?  Then again, many lifetimes have been created, led, and captured in that year.

I guess there are many lessons in that story.  “The risk was worth it,” being an obvious one.  But more to the point of this post is the maxim Carpe Diem. Seize the day.  Take the risks now.  Don’t wait for the right time.  Time will expand or contract or twist into a pretzel to make itself whatever it needs to be, and if you wait for it to explain itself or give you some signal ahead of time, well time can’t act ahead of itself, now can it?