I remember having a conversation with my kids around the dinner table once about how we imagine time. Do you picture the past as pages of a calendar or hills or a spiral or tabs on a computer screen? Many of us, perhaps, think about time as a line – extending behind us and ahead of us. 

Did you know that time has only been depicted as a line, relatively recently? It wasn’t until 1765 that the English chemist, Joseph Priestly, published the first timeline.

In his book, How to Inhabit Time (which I return to blog about every year around my birthday), James K.A. Smith notes the interpretive spin Priestly’s line gives to the concept of time. Depicting time as a time-line makes it look as if time inevitably brings with it progress and achievement. “The line erase[s] all the zigs and zags of contingency, the steps backward, the debts spiraling forward, as if one could map the Amazon with no bends” (p. 90).

As I facilitate grief groups with university students, they often express frustration with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). The “stages” frustrate me, too, as long as I see them as moving in order along a timeline – marching with progress and achievement. But if I see the “stages” as facets or landmarks or touchstones, they more accurately and familiarly reflect my experience of grief.

What if our varying experiences of grief are not progressive points along a line of time but places to which we travel and within which we explore? 

In the spirit of traveling, I have invited students to map their grief. We pour and spread piles of rice onto watercolor paper and outline the shapes the rice makes. Then, we add and name and paint landforms and waterways to describe the world of our grief: the valleys of the shadows of death and the green pastures; the caves of isolation and the oases of holding space; the mountains of memory, the lakes of love, and the forests of fears.

This creative work helps us to let go of our tendency to chart the progress of our grief, and instead, to wonder about how we might explore and visit and inhabit our grief over the course of the rest of our lives.

Last semester, as some of my students were mapping their grief over lost relationships, I decided to make a map about the losses I am experiencing as I grow older. 

In mapping these losses, I aimed to steer clear of twin tendencies: the temptation to fight the aging process as hard as I can, on the one hand; and on the other, the attempt to embrace aging while pretending it doesn’t bother me at all. And so, I poured my rice, traced my little world, and – with equal parts humor and tenderness – named the TIDEPOOLS OF TICKING TIME, the DESERT OF DEATH, the SEA OF NIGHT SWEATS, the FJORDS OF FORGOTTEN WORDS.

I thought I’d finished my map, until last week, I quite suddenly developed tingling, numbness, and then pain in two of my left fingers. The doctor at urgent care assured me that it was nothing systemically serious – something instead to do with my median nerve. I have now added a CARPAL TUNNEL, just north of the PLAINS OF PERIMENOPAUSE, and leading away from the MEMORY MOUNTAINS and the RIVER OF WRINKLES. I find myself grateful that this map has lots of unnamed shores and inlets, as I anticipate adding to it as the years progress.** 

There is a griefiness to this map, but it is not all grief. The act of mapping is an act of naming and remembering – an act of inhabiting time and dwelling with my mortality. Smith writes:

[T]o dwell mortally is to achieve a way of being in the world for which not all change is loss and not all loss is tragic — while at the same time naming and lamenting those losses that ought not to be… To be faithfully mortal is a feat of receiving and letting go, celebrating and lamenting. Being mortal is the art of living with loss, knowing when to say thank you and when to curse the darkness. (pp. 105-106)

What kind of map could you make today? What changes or pains or tragedies could you locate and name? And how, fellow cartographer of loss, might this map help you to navigate and inhabit the days that you have been given?

The NIV only finds one place to translate a Hebrew word into the English word, “map.” But Eugene Peterson finds several more opportunities to paraphrase and use this word and metaphor. I enjoy Psalm 43:3-4:

Give me your lantern and compass,

    give me a map,

So I can find my way to the sacred mountain,

    to the place of your presence,

To enter the place of worship,

    meet my exuberant God,

Sing my thanks with a harp,

    magnificent God, my God.

My map already has a lantern and a compass, but I think I will add a sacred mountain – a place where I know God will hear me, both when I sing my thanks and when I curse the darkness. Both when I lament and when I celebrate.

Header Photo by Patrick Fobian on Unsplash

**For those interested: I saw my family doctor more recently, as my pain in my arm had increased. As a fellow cyclist who has experienced the same symptoms, he thinks I may have a strained nerve in my neck from my cycling position (and my physiotherapist agrees!). I might have to add to my map STRAINED NERVE SUMMIT or CHRONIC PAIN PASS. To be continued…