Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

There’s this trope doing the rounds, that when you turn around thirty, you suddenly develop an interest in birdwatching (twitching). You give up on being childlike-cool, and you instead decide that identifying the flash of colour of a goldfinch or the call of an oystercatcher is a better use of your time.

I developed this a little earlier than thirty, mainly thanks to an ex-girlfriend of mine who was very interested in nature. She taught me how to care for plants, something I once (and still occasionally) regarded as a quite mysterious and frankly inconvenient responsibility.

With her, I remember going walking on the Isle of Skye over to MacLeod’s Maidens, a dramatic set of pinnacles jutting out into the ocean right at the tip of the world. On the way, she picked up this tiny piece of sad-looking sphagnum moss and turned to me, “LOOK! TOM!” she’s got this ungodly grin on her face as she’s pointing at it. I was not really understanding the significance of the occasion at the time, I was just happy she was happy.

But I have started to notice little things. Like the arrival of the first buds on my lilac tree in the garden when it seems to have been dead for months, or that my plants spend all winter looking pretty miserable before producing fresh new foliage in March (I’m looking at my potted fig tree right now). I suppose what’s important to appreciate is that, most of the time, nature is not really interested in providing us with a dramatic spectacle. That is, most of nature’s important stuff happens very slowly.

These days I’ll hear something singing from the tree and feel a sense of smugness that I recognise it to be a robin, all without looking.

I recently spent an afternoon listening to Sandy Denny whilst having a conversation with someone who confessed that they struggle to grieve for as long as they feel they ought to. Anyway the point is, when she was about twenty, Sandy Denny wrote a song called Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

If you’re unfamiliar, she was an English folk singer, usually best remembered for her work with Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin. She had one of those timeless voices that seems eerily familiar with all the kinds of affliction we face in life. Grief and hope seem to coexist within it, as do tragedy and beauty, combined with a tenderness that somehow makes the whole listening experience all the more devastating.

To my ears it’s one of the most beautiful things ever recorded. Particularly the version from the John Peel Sessions in 1973.

The song begins with this vivid image of birds migrating, as she sings in a crescendo, wondering how they know when it’s time to go. I assume what she’s really talking about is the sense of ease with which they accept they are going, rather than any scientific explanation. The seasons change, the birds fly off, and we, of course, are left to be far less dignified in our leaving.

As such, we have invented this infinite collection of things in order to mark and measure our movement through time. Nature goes without any timepieces (other than the sun), and we constantly organise our lives around time passing, yet somehow we are still surprised when it does exactly that.

I turned thirty-one this year, and thirty-one has acquired an unexpected significance to me, and that is that Sandy Denny died at thirty-one. On the 21st April 1978, following a fall, she died in hospital in London. She left behind a daughter, a husband, her remarkable body of music, and a great deal of a life that she would never get to experience. Now, there is something slightly unbearable about listening to Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

When she wrote that song at twenty, being thirty-one must have seemed a very very long way away. I remember being twenty. Being thirty-odd seemed like an age I would never have to confront. I had unlimited confidence in the amount of time at my disposal, despite having no evidence to support it, other than an innate feeling that my youth was unending. There were even more countries I would visit, people I would meet, lessons I would learn, and an entire future waiting patiently for me to get around to it, just exactly when I wanted. It feels strange that now I am permanently older than her.

Indeed, we are reluctant to allow most things to be complete unless it has lasted for what we consider a respectable amount of time. Even an unhappy period of our lives might eventually become something to mourn, and then our youthful years are treated as a kind of sunny paradise from which we are ever so gradually expelled. Memories in particular seem to slowly and surely gain this type of melancholy quality, only, I think, because the specific circumstances that produced them no longer exist.

But beauty is not dependent on the inevitability of its passing. A summer’s evening isn’t beautiful because the winter is coming. It is beautiful because the light falls across the hills in a particular way, and because the air is warm, and momentarily everything seems to have settled into its rightful place. There’s a difference between accepting that something will end, and spending all that time anticipating that it will. The latter seems particularly common. There’s a type of vanity in this, which feels innocent. It’s like our awareness of impermanence places us above the very thing happening before our eyes. I worry it’s bad for us.

The birds do not know they’re symbols of mortality to me. They have no interest in the anxieties of men. They’ll continue arriving in the spring and leaving to sunnier skies in the autumn. Sometimes I envy them.

Of course, the great difficulty with impermanence is that it is far more violent when applied to people. It’s one thing to appreciate leaves in the autumn, and quite another to accept that someone you love will inevitably, through death or some other life event, disappear from your life. So, it is with ease that we can admire the changing seasons, because we have the comforting expectation that they will return.

I’m now just a touch older than Sandy Denny when she died, listening to her sing about the passage of time. Whatever she thought her life might hold, something she created as a young woman has travelled through all those years and found its way into an October evening she would never get to see.

There is no particularly good reason why I should live another fifty years, beyond the statistics that actuaries have performed that say I probably will. We like to believe old age is something we’re owed, far in the distance, in exchange, with God or the universe, for having made it through our youth. Nature has never been interested in that, and this is a frightening thought.

The other day, I was watering one of the plants I’ve had for a long time. I bought it in Dulwich, I think around 2019. It’s grown a lot since, I was thinking about how strange it is that something so (apparently) stationary can be in this endless state of change. The leaves on it now didn’t exist then, and the ones that were there at the time have long since fallen or been pruned away. It’s a real living Ship of Theseus.

Obviously, you might be thinking I’m using this little cheese plant as a sad, slightly laboured metaphor for love, loss and the persistence of memory.

This isn’t about that, it’s about how impermanence is an essential partner to continuance.

Outside, the birds are preparing for winter. I have no idea how they know where they are going, or how they truly decide it’s time to leave. Perhaps somewhere in their little bird-brains they have a deep understanding that we will never possess, or maybe they don’t know anything at all, at least not in the way we insist on knowing.

Either way, when spring comes back around, I’ll be sipping my morning coffee one sunny morning in March, and I will be pleased to see them again.