Where You Invest Your Love, You Invest Your Life (Time)

Sometimes it seems like different areas of my life line up in this weird coincidental way and everything connects…and it is beautiful.

In the educational world, we call this cross-curricular learning (which is so effective and therefore rendered useless and impossible due to testing standards, state mandated curriculum, lack of opportunities for inter-departmental communication, etc). I was listening to a song the other day driving to work. It’s by this band, Mumford and Sons, that has the same effect on me that Justin Beiber has on 95% of the female tweenage population. (The only difference is that their harmonies and lyrics have more layers than Bieberlicious’s bangs…impressive, I know). Usually, when I listen to them, I find myself shaking my head in an old-woman-sitting-in-a-Pentecostal-church-saying –“Amen!” kind of way. These are the lyrics that hit me on my way to work recently.

“In these bodies we will live—in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life.”

The first part of this is so absolute and true. “In these bodies we will live—in these bodies we will die.” That is completely cut and dry, an impregnable argument (unless you are Chris Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, that kid from Third Rock from the Sun, etc). But the second part, “where you invest your love, you invest your life,” is less tenable, especially if you flip it around (which you may argue that’s cheating and it changes the artists’ original meaning and you are probably right, but since I dropped my Logic class after two meetings because I didn’t understand it, I can plead ignorance). But either way, if you switch it around, like I did, this statement becomes much less cut and dry.

“Where you invest your life, you invest your love.”

This made me think about how many hours of the week we spend doing work at our jobs, or at school, compared to how many hours we spend with the people and places and activities that we love.

So this was still in my mind when I started reading this amazing little Emily Dickinson poem (“Because I could Not Stop for Death”) with my American Lit class. It’s one of many poems that Dickinson writes where she hypothesizes what death will be like, and it’s one of the more cheerful ones. Death picks up the narrator in a carriage and escorts her to her grave almost like their going on a date to the movies. It takes about a minute to read through this poem, but what has been a minute for the reader has been centuries for the narrator who is no longer a slave to time since she is dead.

I always use this to lead my students into a discussion where we try to define time. I usually get the same answers most years. Stuff like “Time is a unit of measurement that helps us divide our daily tasks up.” Okay great. So who created it? “Depends on what you believe. I believe that God created time in Genesis.” Okay, so what does it do to us? “It stresses us out.” Why? “Because it makes us late.” How does time make you late? “Because I’m never on time.” But what is time? And they groan and roll their eyes because they realize they haven’t answered the question at all. Usually one or two students will come up with something brilliant and thought provoking. One year a student wrote something like, “I don’t really know what time is, but sports would sure be a whole lot different without it,” which was innovative. Another student wrote something about how time seems to pass differently the older that you get which made her question why our perspective of time changes since time itself is constant…or is it? This past semester, a quieter student spoke up for the first time in weeks, and I’m so glad he did. “To me, time is life. Really, we should only be able to say that we’re out of time once, and that’s when we die.”

(And moments like this are why my job is worth all the heartache and frustration that comes with it).

For once in my life, I had a definition of time that I could accept and live with. I’ve literally stayed up for hours thinking about this question, trying to answer it. And this kid was exactly right. For all that we know, time is life. So when we say things like, “Don’t waste your time,” really we are saying “Don’t waste your life." (And suddenly playing Mah Jong for hours seems even dumber).

So, I left school all jacked up on Emily Dickinson (and Jolly-Ranchers that someone left in the break room) and when I got in my car, that song from earlier was still playing. I started it over.

“In these bodies we will live—in these bodies we will die, Where you invest your love, you invest your life.” I thought about this same song but with my new definition of time in the front of my mind.

“Where you invest your love, you invest your [time].” And inverted: “Where you invest your [time], you invest your love.”

This reiterated my realization from earlier that this isn’t as true in reality as it is in theory. We spend so much of our time working, and working, and working. And then we get home from work and we are so exhausted that we need to recover and catch our breath. We become uninspired consumers of things like television, movies, food, beer, and other passive forms of entertainment (I’m not saying that there aren’t thought provoking forms of all of these things listed—there are, but how many people want to watch The Power of Myth after a hard week of work?) And then before we know it, we’re getting dressed for work again without creating, thinking, or inspiring much of anything. With that being said, it seems so important for us to believe in the work that we do, or at least be more aware of how we spend our lives/time when we aren’t at work.

I think this realization is going to help me strike a better balance between the amount of time(life) I spend consuming versus creating. When I think about the amount of time(life) I waste on a day-to-day doing mindless things (that usually involve the internet), I get frustrated with myself. I should invest my life on things that I love. (And honestly, do I love Mah Jong?) I just feel like I’m spending a lot of time/life with things that aren’t real…and I don’t like it.

When people run out of time, they aren't remembered for all of the things that they owned. "Our dearly departed is survived by a 3 bedroom, 2.5 home with a two-car garage, and an impressive vinyl collection." And my obituary isn't going to list how many hours of time (life) I spent playing Doom or Mah Jong. I'm not saying that these things aren't and shouldn't be a part of the human experience. I'm just questioning how much of my life (time) I've spent on them. Obituaries always list people's names that are connected to the deceased, that survive and aren't out of time yet. This makes me think that the safest and soundest investment of my time is ironically people and their causes.

Despite our fickle nature and our propensity for cruelty, people remain the investment of our time/life/love that can actually love us back. It's a risky market, but usually (not always) the return is worth it.