Iyow - in your own words

The Aymara language, spoken by people living in the high Andes talks about the future as if it lies behind you and the past spreads out in front of you. Aymara speakers refer to the future as qhipa pacha/timpu meaning back or behind time and the past nayra pacha/timpu meaning front time. Their hand gestures are in keeping with their thoughts—they gesture ahead of themselves when remembering the past and backwards when talking about the future.

What is known is seen in front of you, what is unknown is behind you, hidden from view (the future).

I’ve reached my thirties with alarming rapidity. I didn’t know that I would live that long; I celebrate the accomplishment. My parents are visiting for my birthday. I see the folds of skin softening on my mother’s neck, the deepening bags under her eyes, the softening of my father’s stomach, the graying of their hair and I mark the passage of time in their faces and bodies in a way that I can’t seem to see in myself.

I spend my time grabbing at a future that keeps flying into the past. Our dominant culture seems to encourage nostalgia—the glory days of faded youth and ideals. The boundless enthusiasm for botox and injectables for faces and sexy clothing for taut bodies, are eulogies to a time when time was in front of us, not behind us.

If the future was behind me, I would enjoy today more. I would already know that my parents will die, I will stop menstruating and my body will wither. My dog would already be dead. My husband and I would already bicker more than we kiss. I would regret what I didn’t enjoy while I lived it. I would do things differently. I would live in the now, worry less, get through my anxiety and embrace the learning and failing and trying and starting and ending. I would listen more carefully and live more slowly. Wait! I could be doing that NOW.

If the past was in front of me, maybe I wouldn’t run away from it. The hurts, the fears, the small injuries that accumulate and bind me into a million criss-crossing patterns that lock me out of real human contact. I would toss those aside in favor of a grassy knoll on a polluted street in Chicago, embrace the Midwestern nasal vowels and inane queries about race. I would look at myself in the mirror and I would know who I was, who I thought I would become. I would forgive all of my imperfections, laugh at my hopeless quest for perfection. I would dance, waving my hands at all those faces I didn’t kiss, all those days I wasted with my hands outstretched and my mind closed to the possibilities. I would kiss my chidren’s heads and know their names. My dog would be a photograph I could talk about instead of the pest I scold.

How does our present fit into our past and our future? How do we shape them together into the best picture for ourselves?

I am searching for the answers to these questions. Part of my answer involves spending more time silent, and working on projects that give me joy and fill my heart with grace. Walking down a street in a city and watching the streams of careworn faces, people fending off a hostile world with every step rounding their shoulders and gritting their faces, I want to ask them, what if we all enjoyed ourselves as much as possible every day? Let’s stare up into a blue sky and scrub the floor with zest and eat with all of our teeth and sing with all of our hearts. And live without past or future, simply now.

If you have any responses to the questions posed by the author, please comment. We will also post selected original illustrations submitted