The View from the Bridge

From my front window, I can see container ships coming and going under the Golden Gate Bridge. Usually they are heading for the Oakland loading docks, those giant four-legged cranes that look like the walking battle tanks from Star Wars.

On the way back to sea, the ships seem to drift past Alcatraz Island–looking almost the same size as the island as they pass–then float north of the bridge and  loop back around to exit the gate. I suppose they are getting into the deeper lanes or a sea-going current as they meander out of the bay and back to the open water.

My photographer son wanted to use his large-format film camera to capture images around the Golden Gate, and decided to get a shot of a container ship as it passed under the bridge. We walked onto the bridge with a container ship in sight in the distance.  We tried to gauge where it would pass  under us as it moved toward the bridge after making its turn around Alcatraz.

As it came closer, we realized we were in the wrong spot, and tried to correct our position. We could see now that it was moving fast. We ran, dodging tourists, joggers and baby carriages, trying to get in position to catch a picture of it before it slipped out to sea.  We missed it.

We spotted another one coming, and stood where the last one had gone under us, making adjustments as it got closer. This time, we were there, right over top of it as it passed through. Camera at the ready, my son tried to focus and capture the image of the top of the containers rushing below us. It proved much harder to get a good, clear shot than he anticipated. All the effort resulted in pictures of colorful, blurry boxes in dark water.

The imagery of time as water flowing under a bridge is a time-worn cliché. It’s used so much, though, because it captures the feeling we have that time is a slippery, unmanageable, wild thing. Difficult to harness, impossible to stop. Unpredictable, like floods or droughts. Rushing by us into the past with alarming regularity and speed.

Aside: Why does the Steve Miller Band say, “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future?” Isn’t it going into the past? Or is it? Does he mean it’s carrying us into the future? Does time carry us, or slip past us?

My day on the bridge made me think about how time seems to be moving at a manageable pace until you get right up close and realize that, even if you run, it’s hard to have enough time to focus and capture the moment as it passes.

What’s to be done?

James Taylor says “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” That sounds right. “Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill. But since we’re on our way down, we might as well enjoy the ride.”

My instinct is to find the place where time seems to pass the most slowly and try to hang out there, in the moments when I am engaged and aware of all that’s going on around me, really living my minutes. Often those slow-motion moments are not the best ones, though; they might be the times I’m watching from a distance, the opposite of really experiencing the minutes, or the hard times, like the slow, shapeless days spent in the hospital with a loved one, waiting for the doctor to make his rounds, or the nurse to come with the next dose of pain medication.

There are some places where the slow and the good intersect, like at the cabin,  or on a road-trip, or on a snow day (if the power stays on)–bubbles of time that keep the good stuff in and the busy, scary, hectic stuff out.  These aren’t generally the  exciting moments; the times that you laugh hard or get your heart pumping are the hard ones to capture, coming fast when and where you don’t expect them. Maybe the best is losing track of time, like I do when I am immersed in a book or in writing, or  working on a project.

I would love to figure out how to make my own journey through time as enjoyable as possible, taking in all the beautiful and satisfying experiences that life brings me. A nagging thought keeps tapping me on the shoulder, and other images catch in my peripheral vision.

The moments of the people around me affect me too–my neighbors around the bay whose experience of life is so different from mine. How do I incorporate their experience into my own, or begin to make sense of the dichotomy? I can’t pick one small droplet or one little bubble in the river of time to ride happily while people in the water next to me are drowning.

What to do with that?

Here at the start of my 31 day reflection about water, I’m looking forward to diving in and remembering time past, reflecting on how water and imagery of water flows through so many aspects of my life, and discovering where all this thinking will lead.