Reclaiming my time at the threshold of another new season

The soft joy of saying goodbye—and hello—in the middle of a complicated life

Last week, I said a goodbye of sorts to a place that’s meant a lot to me since I was just a kid: a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, that my grandparents built in the late 90s, and where I spent a good portion of most every summer over the last 25 years, which I’m happy to report still constitutes “most of my life”.

It’s not the biggest beachhouse that ever was; it’s not the most modern, nor the most recently-renovated; nor is it the closest to the beach (it’s perhaps the half-mile walk to the shore that I’ll miss the most, weirdly). But as a place, as home, it’s inseparable from my family, my childhood, and my sense of place as a recovering East coaster.

The house is leaving our family later this year, which I’ve of course taken as a minor tragedy and personal offense despite my never having contributed to the financial or physical health of the place.

The vicious time and space constraints of my summer had, until recently, dictated that I might actually not get to see it again. As a result, I jumped at an unexpected chance to spend a couple of days there over spring break prior to a work trip to Washington, DC. I took some precious time with my parents (and a bit by myself) to enjoy the place; to look at it properly for the first and last time; to imprint it on my memory as permanently as possible; and to say goodbye.

This, it turned out, was just what the doctor ordered: a brief moment of calm in the in-between, at the end of a very long era and the beginning of another.

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I’ve found many reasons over the years to revere the late poet, philosopher, and theologian John O’Donohue. He was wise beyond compare, compassionate and open to so many perspectives on spirituality despite (or, if we dare, because of) his devotion as a former ordained Catholic priest in the Celtic tradition.

And by God, the accent; I could listen to the man talk about “limestone” and “landscape” for hours.

But perhaps the teaching I’ve taken most from reading and listening over the years to O’Donohue (who passed away suddenly and far too young in 2008) involves what he calls “thresholds”: small windows of time that transition us (sometimes chaotically) from one stage of life to another.

Take this passage, for example, from his lovely posthumous book To Bless the Space Between Us, on the beautiful possibilities we can uncover when the seasons change, as they are for many of us right now:

We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.

These words ring truer in March than they would normally, with temperatures vainly attempting to reach some springtime escape velocity; a desperate hope of leaving sub-40 degree mornings behind until later this year. I’m rooting for them. I certainly was in Bethany Beach, where I strolled along the shore, battling the clouds and wind, hovering precariously in the mid-40s, not daring to dip a single toe in the ocean (I’m sentimental, but I’m not insane).

I enjoyed only a couple of days at the house before I was thrown back into the reality of my work (which I love) and away from decades of rich past spent on the southern tip of Delaware. Another threshold for me. I drove myself half-mad wandering around the premises, trying to collect my “lasts”: the last walk on the beach (see above); the last morning hum of the old Black and Decker coffeemaker my mom and her siblings apparently refused to replace with something from the 21st century; the last walk on the boardwalk (didn’t happen, nothing is open in March). I did, at least, sneak in a last run along the creek that abuts the west side of South Bethany, and snap a picture while I was at it:

Jefferson Creek, South Bethany, DE, March 2024

Thresholds like these—however low-stakes, like saying goodbye to a family beach house—can be scary, mainly because they overflow with the unknown. My twenty-five summers at 10 Addy Road are set in stone; they are known, understood, and blessed. They have meaning for me—and only probably a couple dozen other family members—that can’t be replaced because it was gathered, earned, and loved in one particular place and time.

But there is also great promise, presence, and information to be mined from these in-between moments, and I was lucky enough to find them on my Bethany Beach swan song last week. These truths were held precariously between my being there in the place I’ve loved so dearly; and my reluctant letting go of it. Here’s John O’Donohue again:

It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.

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That’s all well and good, John, but what if life doesn’t allow for “taking your time” with all the thresholds available to you? Thresholds can be beautiful and enlightening, but they can also be chaotic and imprecise in ways that throw us (or at least me) off kilter. I tell myself every day that I need to take the bad with the good; that things balance out; that every goodbye is another hello, etc.

Fine sentiments all. But we don’t all face these thresholds sitting in the lotus position in the middle of a peaceful limestone-lined field in a rural county of Ireland; we face them most often when we least expect it, and even in the everyday chaos when we are aren’t really able to handle them.

This feeling of imbalance—of both time and place—is masterfully embodied in a favorite poem of mine by Barbara Crooker:

In The Middle

of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

I love this poem deeply, and for many reasons. It has one of my favorite characteristics of a poem in that it’s useful: its facility with language and metaphor helps me deal with the relentless passage of time, which (longtime readers will know) is something I continually struggle with.

First, Crooker pulls one of my favorite moves that some poets deploy, which is to use the title of the poem to actually begin the text of the poem itself. It’s ingenious in this instance because it conveys the message that Crooker—the poet who, we remind ourselves, is fully in charge of how this poem is going to turn out when it goes to print—doesn’t even have the time to write out the first line fully, or to come up with a separate title. Time is running away with us, and with her, and it’s taking the damn title of the poem with it. Baffling ingenuity.

Another trick: The narrator’s grandfather’s clock (is it a “grandfather clock"?) is stopped, but she doesn’t have time (naturally) to get it repaired. A little on the nose? Sure. But I’m of the firm belief that poems shouldn’t always feel the need to make the reader wade through layers of complexity to get you where you need to go. There’s no time to waste, after all.

The analog clock metaphor is made even more potent later on, when the dog’s tail is described as a “metronome, 3/4 time”; but the visual of it also could be (of course) a pendulum of its own, flying back and forth, reliably ticking away time the way the pendulum on her grandfather’s clock can no longer do.

Crooker’s narrator is observing threshold after maddening threshold: “One day you look out the window/green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen”; “between morning's quick coffee/and evening's slow return”'; “caught between the mesh/of rope and the net of stars.” Either she hasn’t read John O’Donohue, or she’s simply got no time for him. These thresholds are coming fast and loose, and the poem keeps moving forward before we can internalize, much less “listen inward with complete attention” any of them. Sorry, John; we tried.

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It’s hard to blame the narrator of Crooker’s poem. I can’t be the only reader finding resonance in the poem, which speaks to a universal truth we all must face: despite my main guy John O’Donohue’s musings, even the most monk-ish of us lives in a modern age that’s impossible to navigate without blowing past a few important thresholds of life with reckless abandon. In this instance, Crooker’s narrator is observing time running along the beach¹, “urging us on faster, faster.”

O’Donohue tells us that “the time has come to cross” this threshold mindfully, to acknowledge and love the change, and to get the most out of the transition.

I don’t want to get the most out of this. I cross the threshold reluctantly. This house, this place, this space, has been part of my life for more than a quarter century. Aside from buildings where my name’s been on the lease or mortgage, there’s certainly no place in this world I’ve spent more hours, played more ruthless games of Catan or Diplomacy with my cousins, or slept more playfully exhaused, sun-kissed nights in, than 10 Addy Road in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

And yet O’Donohue has his way in the end. He knows I was paying attention all those years, and that nobody can take this sunrise—recorded in a completely foreign season of my life—away from me, ever. I have the glorious, absolute power to take it with me wherever I go for the rest of my life, and I’ll happily use that power like a mad king. On to the next threshold.

Sunrise at Middlesex Beach, DE, July 2009.

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Place Picks

Finally, a couple relevant or semi-relevant Place Picks to round out the week:

Music

“Blue Mind” by Alexi Murdoch (Apple/Spotify)

Although he hasn’t released new music for well over a decade, Alexi Murdoch’s two full-length albums—Time Without Consequence (2006) and Towards the Sun (2009)—are both among my favorites. I have particular memories of the former (which I’m now realizing with horror is nearly twenty years old) playing through my shitty late-2000s earbuds as I lay on the beach in Delaware, roasting alive because I refused to put on even close to the amount of sunscreen my mom implored me to; but drifting in and out of sleep all the same in my collapsing beach chair, hearing the ocean churn to and fro since I couldn’t afford anything noise-cancelling.

The daily beach visit (after that half-mile walk from the house) was always an appropriate listening venue for “Blue Mind” in particular, which—in addition to being a gorgeous ode to drifting atop the ocean—also acknowledges and embodies the passage of time, and how we might approach one of O’Donohue’s thresholds in a healthy fashion:

So watch your time
Time descends
Let it spill quietly
From your hand

If we’ve learned any lessons today, it’s that you can’t stop time any more than you can stop the churning of the ocean around you. So if you must watch it go by, “let it spill quietly/from your hand” rather than try in vain to snatch it back as it tumbles away.

Listening

“‘How to Be Happy' with Dr. Laurie Santos”, Offline with Jon Favreau.

Some readers may recognize Jon Favreau’s name, probably because there are two reasonably famous Jons who share the same name. One, probably more famous Jon Favreau directed and appeared in many Iron Man and Spider-Man movies, and co-created The Mandalorian series for Disney Plus.

The Jon Favreau who hosts this podcast is the former head speechwriter for President Barack Obama, is a co-founder of Crooked Media and co-host of the immensely popular Pod Save America podcast. Favreau also hosts this (much more useful and less explicitly partisan) podcast about how to navigate a digital age dominated by social media, corporate algorithms, and an Internet gone to hell in a handbasket.

In this episode, Jon and his guest, Dr. Laurie Santos (Yale), talk about how to reclaim our time and move towards a more fulfilling—and notably vulnerable—state of being with our fellow people. High recommend for this podcast generally if you enjoy feeling superior to others losing their minds on social media.

Reading

“Is this the least productive congress ever? Yes, but it’s not just because they’re lazy.”

Yes, I’m logrolling! I wrote a piece for The Conversation about Congress, and whether it’s fair to call them the least productive Congress ever. The short answer—which is the answer to most questions posed of me about Congress—is “yes, but it’s complicated.” Read more above, or (if you’re short on time) watch the pithy one-minute Instagram Reel I made for The Conversation below.

theconversationdotcom

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Watching

Speaking of Congress, my co-workers and I were lucky enough to have scheduled our trip to Washington, D.C. during the peak bloom of the city’s magnificent cherry trees, which in February of 1912 were shipped from Yokohama, Japan on board the S.S. Awa Maru, bound for Seattle. Upon arrival, they were transferred to insulated freight cars to be shipped to D.C., where they arrived later that March, and were planted fastidiously around Washington’s Tidal Basin over the following decade.

Here we are, 112 years later. I’m not a great photographer, and it’s tough to capture them perfectly, but at least you can get a taste of how gorgeous the blossoms are, with a classic Jefferson Memorial background. Not much more Washington than this, at least for me.

1. … as I often did, in stolen-away moments of vacation privacy away from my family whom I love very dearly