The Geometry of Time

How going back teaches you to move forward

Time flies. That’s what we tell ourselves. But what does it really mean?

Some days whiz by faster than others. Some — those we’d rather be spending elsewhere, beaming ourselves somewhere else entirely — seem endless. But it’s when time bends, folds back on itself, and pulls you bodily into the past that you truly feel its power.

That’s what happens to me every year when I travel back to England.

My dad still lives in the house where he and my late mother raised their four children. This September marks 63 years since my parents married and moved in. It was Dad’s hometown before that — his parents’, too. A market town in the Fens, quiet and unhurried, not all that accessible without a car, though the double-decker bus has served me well these past weeks. I take my seat on the top deck every time, looking out across the flat fenlands and their enormous skies. The weather has been moody — spectacular cloud formations, the occasional drenching my umbrella just about handles — and somehow that moodiness feels right. Time here has its own weather.

Time plays games with you in a place like this. It conspires to whirl you around and set you down in another decade entirely.

One evening during this current stay, I met up with eight friends from high school — an all-girl grammar school where we were, by our own proud admission, a mischievous bunch. Most of us left at 16 to attend technical colleges across the region. Some went further afield. Helen went to Australia. I went to California. The other six stayed on in the Fens, building careers, partnerships, raising children, and now, half of them, helping out with their local grandchildren. On paper, our lives could not look more different.

But what struck me over four hours of laughter and catching up — with women I hadn’t seen more than once or twice in 44 years — was that time is the greatest equalizer. After all those divergent decades, we all still want the same things: to be happy, healthy, and connected to the people we love. Careers, homes, achievements — the things that feel so urgent when we’re young — recede. What remains is something more essential. The trick, I’ve come to believe, is to stay aware of time. To let it take you back to your earlier self now and then, and to step back into the present carrying a little more of that original person with you.

At the end of the evening, I was going to call a taxi for the ten-mile drive back to Dad’s house. “Don’t be daft,” said Elaine, who drives a disability car following a motorcycle accident some years ago. “I’ll take you.”

Elaine turned 60 this year. I’m joining that club this summer. The two of us hadn’t seen each other since we were 16. We giggled and guffawed the whole way, trading notes on life in Lincolnshire versus life in California. She told me about the market stall selling farm-fresh produce she’d run for years before her accident. She said she was proud of me for being a famous author. I’m not famous by any means — but I am an author. The girls at dinner had remembered how I used to churn out 20-page stories to their two or three pages in English class, and apparently that stayed with them longer than it stayed with me.

I worried about Elaine driving off alone into the dark fen night. “Don’t get lost out there,” I said. She laughed. The backroads that meander out toward the Wash have become a bit of a mystery to me over the years. She assured me she’d be fine.

The next morning, when our group chat filled up with messages about what a wonderful evening it had been, I checked to make sure she’d made it home.

“I only got a little bit lost,” she said.

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Time stands still at Dad’s house in some ways. In others, it hums. Gardening. Feeding the birds. Maintaining the gates and the paintwork. An almost 87-year-old widower keeping an immaculate, orderly home — it’s quietly astonishing. His transistor radio on at breakfast. His preference, each evening, for reruns of television shows from twenty years ago. A dove cooing outside the window where I sit writing, at the very desk my mother used to use.

There is a different relationship with time in a place like this. Information doesn’t arrive in an avalanche. News doesn’t chase you from room to room. I hauled my laptop across the Atlantic and have opened it only a handful of times. When the wifi has been scarce, I’ve barely reached for my phone. And it has been an eye opener — a quiet I’d almost forgotten existed.

Time here is walked rather than driven. The route to the grocery store via the longer path along the river, past the bank of trees filled with birdsong on a May morning, is meditative. Planning bus connections as I did before I learned to drive and longed for the outside world. Listening to strangers talk British politics on public transport. Working around my dad’s exacting routines, which used to test my patience when I was younger and which I now recognize as his way of holding the days in shape.

You’d think California was laid back — that’s its reputation, its selling point. But it’s an illusion. There’s a supercharged energy to life there that I don’t notice until I step away from it. In the market towns near Dad’s, I watch people moving through their errands at a measured pace. Unhurried. Present. It looks, from the outside, like something that used to be ordinary and now feels almost radical. The refusal to fast forward, to be content with completing the day’s tasks.

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Time at the start of a journey seems boundless. Time at the end of it contracts.

I’m near the end of this one. And I find myself wondering — as I imagine many of us do, in these complicated, demanding years — whether we’ll look back on this period and recognize it as one of the good ones regardless. I think I will. I’ve packed in more quality time with Dad, my siblings, aunt and uncle, nieces, and old friends than I’d dared to hope for. More days out and evenings than I expected. Plenty to write about at length when I get home.

But for now, time is of the essence. And I am, for once, paying attention to it.