Terrible Timing

Let’s face it: my timing is often really, really bad.

On the sunny Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, I was on an airplane awaiting a flight from Denver to Chicago to return to the project I was working on. I had a comfortable seat in business class and was just waiting for boarding to finish and the flight to get underway.

But something was wrong. The time to close the door and push back from the boarding bridge had come and gone, but we were still there. And there was some commotion among the crew. Another passenger mentioned that an airplane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers, but we all assumed it was probably a small plane that didn’t do any real damage, and we couldn’t see the connection to our delay.

Then either the captain or the lead flight attendant gave us the news: a serious incident was underway in New York and was affecting air travel all across the country. They were unsure when or even if our flight would be cleared to depart. We all began to feel like something major was happening, something that would present a big disruption. A short time later we were told a second plane had hit a tower, that it was very serious, and that we would have to get off the plane and make other arrangements. No flights were being allowed to take off anywhere in the country.

Of course we all know what happened that day and how it affected air travel for the next several days and beyond. It was bad timing for me. I had to figure out how I was going to get home from the airport because taxis were not being allowed to come to the terminal. What’s more, my luggage had already been put on an earlier plane and was not available: it was in some city somewhere between Denver and Chicago.

Fortunately, I was able to rebook my trip for the following Saturday and find a fellow passenger who had a car and was willing to give me a lift home. My missing suitcase got back to Denver on Friday, just in time for me to claim it and recheck it the next morning to get to Chicago.

Yeah, that was bad timing. But I suppose it could have been worse. I could already have been in the air and forced to land in someplace like Omaha, Nebraska. And my timing was certainly not as bad as for those people who had taken off from Boston or Washington that morning only to be incinerated when their planes were crashed into those buildings. My timing wasn’t as bad as for the workers in the buildings who were killed or the firefighters and others who lost their lives trying to save them.

It was only a minor inconvenience for me, far worse for a lot of other people. I have never lost sight of that.

I have had a few other instances of bad timing in the past. I was on Guam when a “super typhoon” hit the island. I got caught in a blizzard on I-95 somewhere north of Portland, Maine, just a month after I returned from Guam. The POS car I had just bought completely broke down in the midst of heavy snow, swirling winds, and subzero temperatures. I might have frozen to death there if a snowplow hadn’t come along and rescued me. And Colorado snows caught me at bad times more than once.

 Those are just a few examples, but I don’t think they are any more significant than what most other people have encountered in their lives. And I have been fortunate enough to have missed a few bad things too.

This Time my Timing Really Sucks

All of this brings me to my present situation. And this time, I don’t think my timing could be much worse. After living in Ukraine for just about 12 years, I decided that it was finally time to leave. I had been thinking about this for a long time, and I kept putting it off for various reasons. But by late 2019, I knew that the time had come. It was only a matter of deciding when exactly to go.

The key date in all of this was March 29, 2020, which is when my residency permit expires. I have had to renew this permit annually since I first got it in March of 2013. I decided that there was no point in renewing it again since I was going to leave. Sure, I could have gone ahead and renewed it and then left in May or June, but I felt that would have been a bit dishonest.

So, I gave my company my notice in January and began preparing. I set the end of February as my last day at work and 21/22 March as my date to fly from Ukraine to Belgium. I also made plans for a vacation in Ireland during the first three weeks of April and a second trip to another European destination from late April to early May. It was all organized and looked good.

Then the Wuhan virus hit.

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere!

We all know the unbelievable whirlwind that has kicked up over this virus in the past weeks. It spread like wildfire and has killed thousands (mostly in China and Italy), and it has crippled the economies of countries all over the world. And a big effect is that it has shattered the travel plans of millions of people. There has never been anything like it.

Just before it hit I had made extensive travel plans. Those travel plans, of course, have been shredded.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the world suddenly went mad. Countries banned incoming flights; cruise ships were unable to dock anywhere; cities, states and countries went on partial or total “lockdowns” curtailing domestic air, rail and bus travel. Large gatherings were banned. Schools were closed and students put on extended vacation, and millions of workers were told to work from home. “Social distancing” became a thing.

The National Hockey League suspended its season, as did just about every other athletic league in the world. Concerts and other large meetings were canceled, including political rallies in the United States (it’s an election year). Restaurants, cafes and bars closed. Thanks to the irresponsible media, people panicked and started buying and hoarding supplies (most strangely including toilet paper).

All this madness exploded in such a short time that it is still hard to get my head around all that has happened. And in the middle of all this, I had a carefully organized plan to leave Ukraine, do some traveling, and then head to the U.S. for a while.

I was supposed to leave on 21 March, but as of 17 March, all transportation in or out of Ukraine is suspended. They say it’s for two weeks, and my flights were canceled. I rebooked for 1 April, but on 19 March I was informed that those flights were canceled. The airline ceased operation of its ticketing call center, so I was left with no alternative but to use an online form to request another rebooking. I am still waiting for some word.

I have doubts now that I will get out of Ukraine in time to make my planned flight from Brussels to Dublin to begin my vacation in Ireland. I really don’t know when I will be able to get out of Ukraine. And on top of that, Belgium is on a pretty strict lockdown, so I am not sure whether I would even be able to go there in early April.

But yet, I have to leave Ukraine soon: my residency permit expires on 29 March. It’s a foregone conclusion that I will not be able to leave the country before the permit expires, but I have assurances that I will not be penalized under the circumstances. However, I don’t know how long after the expiration the authorities will allow me to stay.

I suppose it goes without saying now that my Ireland trip is probably a goner. One of the B&Bs I planned to stay at in April has already informed me that they will be closed. And the state of things in Ireland is very unsure. It certainly seems like early/mid-April is going to be a bad time to try and visit the land of me ancestors. It looks like my focus tomorrow will be on canceling those plans.

My second trip, from late April to early May, is probably also going to have to be canceled. Maybe I’ll be able to move the Ireland trip to that time period and just drop the second trip entirely.

My grand plan included leaving Belgium sometime around the 18^th of May and flying to Colorado with a five-day layover in Iceland. I haven’t booked it yet, but even that is looking like it might not work out.

The thing is that no one really knows how long this thing will last. Will it subside in April? Will it go on until May? Longer? It’s all a mystery at the moment.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda…

If I had made different plans, this wouldn’t have devastated me the way it has. If I had left at the end of 2019, I would probably be in the U.S. now. If I had decided to renew my permit and stay in Ukraine until May or June, I’d simply be riding it out here until it subsided elsewhere. Kharkiv has not yet seen a single instance of the infection, so it’s about as safe a place as there might be.

But, I did not do either of those things. Unknowingly I set travel plans for the worst time to travel that there has ever been – outside of an active shooting war. Yep, my timing was really terrible on this.

I can’t change things, of course. I just have to deal with the situation as it is and try to find the best way through it. That’s all any of us can do in these kinds of circumstances.

But it sure sucks!

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Getting Short

I’m starting to get that familiar old feeling: I’m a short-timer.

“Short-timer” is the feeling you get when a period in your life is approaching its anticipated end. Most often it’s about the looming end of a job or of living in a particular place. You know the end is coming soon, and a big change is approaching. Your time in the current job or place is short.

You might have thought about such a change earlier, but it was not certain or was still rather distant. Now the change is real, and you can see it on the horizon. There is excitement, but there is also some fear. The key is to control and minimize the fear while embracing the excitement and letting it energize you.

The reason I have that short-timer feeling is that I am coming to the end of one of the longest periods of my life. In just a little more than a week, I will leave the company I have been working with in one form or another for 11 and a half years, full-time for almost five. And even more significantly I am leaving Ukraine in just about a month, ending an “adventure” that began in 2006 and became full-time in mid-2008. But more about that later in this post.

In the Navy

The first time I was really aware of being a short-timer was when I was in the navy and stationed on the island of Guam. My assignment on Guam, as well as my enlistment in the navy, was coming to an end in December. I was going to be leaving behind a tropical paradise I had become very used to for 18 months and saying goodbye to some of the best friends I had ever had up to that point in my young life.

That year and a half on Guam was one of the most influential times in my life. It shaped me in many ways: some good, some not so good. Early in that time I suffered what was probably the most gut-wrenching emotional trauma of my life (it didn’t happen on the island), and when I returned to the island after dealing with it, I fully embraced the “sex, booze and rock ‘n roll” lifestyle with my friends. But it was just a “crutch” to try to deal with what had happened earlier. They were many wild times, and toward the end I found myself growing tired of the partying and found a new crutch: religion.

I left the life I knew on Guam for one of uncertainty. I returned “home” to Massachusetts for a time, but I had no idea what I would do next. I missed my life on Guam, especially being in frigid New England in the middle of winter and with no friends. I was totally lost. I was insecure. By March, I had agreed to reenlist in the navy with the promise of being sent to language school and becoming an intelligence analyst.

But I still remember the short-timer feeling during the last month or two on Guam. While there was some excitement at the approaching change, there was actually a lot more fear. What was coming after Guam was unknown; I had no plan, no dream. It was a black hole.

The next time I really felt that short-timer feeling was years later when I was wrapping up my six years in Japan, as well as ending my overall navy service. This time, however, I knew what I was heading into: I was going to return to Colorado and attend Colorado State University to finish my degree.

It was all planned and set, so there wasn’t that same “black hole” feeling, but there were still some uncertainties. I was almost 30 and had not really lived as a civilian for most of my adult life up to that point. Plus, I was headed back to a marriage relationship that had never really worked, and I seriously doubted that it could be made to work. You can’t “reinvigorate” something that never really had any vigor.

Although I had plans and knew where I was headed, there was still that odd feeling of having the days wind down toward the inevitable departure date. I had begun to chafe at certain aspects of military life by then, but I did enjoy the intellectual challenge of my work in navy intelligence. I was very good at what I did and got a lot of accolades for it. I would miss that feeling of importance, and I would also miss keeping tabs on all those “commie” ships and aviation units. I had gotten to know some of them so well that they almost seemed like old friends.

Leaving the University

I spent two and a half years at Colorado University completing my degree. Although there were some difficult times, like getting divorced just a few months after I had arrived from Japan, my years at CSU were some of the best of my life, in many ways even better than Guam. Fort Collins at that time was a wonderful place to live. I had my motorcycle, I had some really special friends, I enjoyed the university environment and had more good times then I can count. And I found – and lost – the most significant love of my life.

In that final spring, as graduation was approaching and big changes were looming right behind it, I again began to feel that short-timer feeling. I was leaving a fairly carefree and fun life and headed into the world of regular work days and all that comes with that. I had a job lined up, but still I felt some trepidation about the change. I wasn’t confident that it was all going to work out – and for good reason.

There have been some other short-time situations along the way: leaving the Colorado Lottery and leaving Colorado to return to Massachusetts for a time, leaving the company I worked for there and Massachusetts two years later to return to Colorado, and leaving MTB, the project management company I worked at before I made the move to Ukraine.

Leaving my house in the mountains was a different sort of feeling. I didn’t really face the reality of it until the last few days when I packed up my stuff and drove away.

Leaving Ukraine

And now, here I am as a short-timer again. I have been talking or writing about making a big change for years, but only last year I finally began to make it a reality. I have known for some time that I would be leaving in early 2020 and I set the timetable just after New Year. It began to really hit me in mid-January when I scheduled my last courses at EPAM. It felt strange to know that this would be the last time I would do these courses, and these students would be my last.

And as the time has grown closer, I’ve been feeling it more and more. A few weeks ago I started purging my stuff. I sold my bike and have arranged to sell or give away a number of other things I have collected over the past decade to create a comfortable home here. I can’t take them with me, so better to find good homes for them. But the process of doing this really drives home the reality of the end being very nearly here.

One aspect of being a short-timer that has never really affected me, however, is falling into the “don’t care” mode and just doing the bare minimum at work. In the military, it was common for short-timers to be the least reliable workers. In combat situations (which I never faced) it was understood that once you got short, you had to do everything possible to avoid putting yourself in danger so that you could just survive those final weeks and days.

I don’t think that way. Perhaps in a combat situation I would, but in normal work situations, I’ve always been fully engaged right to the end. In the past few weeks I have still found myself tweaking and improving parts of my courses, as I always have, and even creating a few new things.

This will probably be the last time I will really have this short-timer feeling. I don’t imagine I will ever again be in such a situation. I see the remainder of my life as being more of a free-flowing, independent endeavor in which I do what I want to do where I want to do it (finances permitting). I guess that is fitting because in reality, I have never been a very “settled” kind of person. Staying in one place, as I have for the past decade, seems to be contrary to who I am, and it is probably why I have often felt so much anxiety here for the past few years. I have been overdue to make a change.

So I am short. And very soon everything is going to change. I am excited, though not as much as in my younger years. And I have a bit of fear, but again not as much as a few other times. What I do notice about this time is more sadness than usual. I am not sad to be leaving the company or Ukraine, but I know that there are a few people here whom I am really going to miss – a lot. Leaving them behind is the hardest part.

But that’s life. It’s a short-timer thing.

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2020: The Unimaginable Year

Who would have thought?

It’s just a few hours before the calendar will flip over to the year 2020. And I’m still here. I never thought I would be.

Earlier today I created a new worksheet in my Excel budget and cash flow document. It’s a fresh worksheet for the year 2020. I have sheets for each year going back to 2008. I kept track like that even earlier, but I don’t have those docs any longer, only the ones I’ve been keeping since I’ve been in Ukraine.

As I looked at the year on the new tab – 2020 – I was struck by the numbers themselves. I am about to enter into another decade, just one more on top of the dusty pile. But what I really got to thinking about was years ago when I was in my teens, my 20s, my 30s, and how I could never have imagined even being alive in such a futuristic year as 2020.

Back in the 70s and 80s, even the year 2000 – the next century – was too far in the future to seem realistic. The only things that would get me thinking about it occasionally were futuristic movies and Prince telling us to “Party like 1999.” In the early and mid-90s, it was getting closer but still seemed unreal.

And then it happened: 1999 became 2000. And I seemed to have missed the party that Prince promised us.

If 2000 was too far in the future to think about, imagine how 2020 must have seemed. Twenty years more. I really could not even begin to imagine myself at such a far-off time. To be honest, I didn’t think I would even live that long. To be even more honest, I don’t think I really wanted to live that long. The thing I feared most was becoming old, and – damn! – it has happened.

I guess I should be glad that I am still here. In my mind I don’t feel as old (and decrepit) as I thought I would. My body, on the other hand, likes to remind me otherwise.

Getting back to those movies, they certainly over-promised the future. Back in those glorious days of my youth, we were promised that by this time we would be exploring the stars and have all kinds of amazing and wonderful devices. I fully expected that by now I would be able to teleport instantly to other parts of the world as easily as I walk from my kitchen to the bathroom now. In fact, I probably could have teleported from the kitchen to the bathroom.

But, nope… hasn’t happened.

I was certain that we would have flying cars by now, perhaps even running on nuclear fusion generators (yeah… “Back to the Future”), but that too was just a pipe dream. It’s probably for the best; living in Ukraine and seeing how poorly drivers do in two dimensions, I can only imagine the carnage if we had cars operating in three.

But to get back to the point (not that this post really has one), we are about to step into the third decade of the century. I won’t say how many decades this has been for me. Let’s just say it’s “too many” and leave it at that. It leaves me with a certain sadness that so much of my life has been lost to the past and so little now remains for the future. But that’s how life is.

No. I never thought it would be this way.

As I wrote five years ago in my post, Life at the Speed of Time, the cruelest thing about time is the way it accelerates faster and faster as we get older. Time just keeps passing quicker and quicker – and then we are gone.

I am moving closer and closer to the ultimate abyss. I know this. But there is still a bit of space left between now and that point. I don’t know for sure how much, but some. I just hope I can use that time better than I have for the past decade or so.

The year that I could never imagine is here. It is going to be a year of big change. All the changes that I have been touting year after year since at least 2012 are about to happen. Do I have enough time to make them count for something? Or, as I feared in my youth, is 2020 too far gone?

Time will tell… as it always does.

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This was a pretty random post. But that’s what happens when you sit at the computer with a bottle of wine. I was determined to write my 100^th blog post before the New Year, and for better or worse, here it is.

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Now is All There Is

Imagine a tiny circle of light in a universe of neverending darkness. What you see in the circle is the present moment in your life. Your life runs along a line from right to left. The right is the future coming into the circle, and the left is the past that has exited the circle.

This circle is like a small looking glass that shows you what is happening now. What you see in the illuminated circle is all there is; nothing else is real. Before it gets to the circle, the future part of your life's time line doesn’t exist because it hasn’t yet emerged from the dark. And after it leaves the circle, it ceases to exist as it is swallowed up by the past. It is gone and can never return.

Only what is in the lighted circle is real. The lighted circle is now, and it is all there is.

A Case Study

It sounds cliché because we hear it said, and we read Internet memes all the time that tell us to “live in the now,” or “only the now exists.” But although it has become trendy and trite, it is, nevertheless, true. I have been thinking a lot about this the past few years, and yesterday, as I sat on an airplane jetting from Brussels to Kyiv, it was solidly on my mind.

For the four and a half days of my visit to my daughter’s home in Belgium, my reality was the sights and sounds of the marvelous old house that they are renovating: the smiles and laughter of children who love me (and whom I love); a big, shaggy and gentle black dog; sleep-filled nights in a cold – yet wonderfully quiet – room; the sounds of spoken French and Dutch; a delicious Thanksgiving dinner.

What was not real was my life in Kharkiv. It was in the past and would return from the future, but for those days it was (almost) as though it did not exist.

But suddenly my short-lived reality in Belgium slid out of the lighted circle and faded into the darkness of the past, almost like it had never happened, like it had been a dream. My new reality at the time I wrote most of this in a notebook was my seat on an airplane and the space around me: the tall, young and attractive girl to my left on the other side of an empty seat and the strange old guy across the aisle in the row to my right who had all three seats to himself and took advantage to spread his meal across all three tray tables. More power to him! It was about the nasty guy behind me who kept pushing on my seat back and then complained if I reclined a few inches.

My “now” at that time was the whooshing drone of the jet engines, the ring of various aircraft alerts, and the buzz of passengers, punctuated occasionally by a crying child. It was the deep blue divider curtains hanging in front of me and across the aisle to my right. Outside the plane it was a blue sky above white clouds that had all turned dark halfway through the flight.

But even that was fleeting. The timeline moved again and the flight became lost in the past. Beneath the lighted circle now was Boryspil Airport, a crowded shuttle bus and a race to the passport control line. It was going through security again, and then boarding yet another cold shuttle bus for the flight to Kharkiv. It was similar to the reality at the Brussels airport, but yet it wasn’t the same; that reality had been lost to the darkness of the past hours before.

And so it continued. I was once again on an airplane, and all that was real was what surrounded me for that 50-minute flight. Then it was gone, and reality became snowy Kharkiv and a taxi ride back to my apartment.

Finally, the entire trip – from beginning to end – had slid under the lighted circle and run off into the oblivion of the past. It was gone, and once again, my reality was my apartment, road noise and neighbor noise, trying to sleep but finding it hard.

And so it continues. “Back to reality,” as they say. Today it was work, classes, and everything else that makes up my mundane daily reality. But that too will become just a memory one day soon as it fades into the past for good, replaced by yet a new reality.

The Nature of Our Lives

The now keeps shifting along the timeline of our lives, and only what is happening now is illuminated by that little circle of light. It is the only thing that is truly real. And each reality, each “now,” constantly fades out of existence as it is replaced by a new now. And it seems to me that as I get older, this process happens faster and faster.

Vacations really drive home how this transition works, and they also present us with a certain sadness over how the now can never remain. I touched on this in a blog post called, “Post-VacationBlues,” the final installment of my series on my “Dream Vacation” to Portugal and the Azores in 2016. I noted how during the vacation my regular life didn’t seem to exist, but once I was back in Kharkiv, the entire two weeks of travel felt like little more than a dream.

Like everything else, vacations move out of the little circle of light and speed off into the darkness that becomes the past. We remember that it happened, and we have photos and souvenirs to remind us. So, in a respect, it did exist – but it doesn’t exist any longer because it’s not the now.

In another post, “Life at the Speed of Time,” I also looked at how time just flies by faster and faster to the point that most of my life just seems like a series of dreams, sort of like movies I might have seen. The further in the past certain events, places or people are, the more I question whether they ever happened at all. Once again, I know logically that they did exist, but I understand that they no longer do.

So once time rolls past that little illuminated circle and into the past it stops being real, it just doesn’t exist any longer. And the future, likewise is not real, at least not until it reaches our little looking glass and – briefly – becomes the now. Plans, dreams, hopes, expectations: none of them exist, until they do. And then they too are fleeting and are soon consumed by the past.

In those cliché admonishments about “living in the now,” we are told to focus on what is happening at the moment, to enjoy it and to get the most out of it. The reason is that once the time has slipped past the small lighted circle, it is gone forever. Most of us really don’t focus on the now and make the most of it.

I have to admit that for most of my life, I have been too busy worrying about the future or fretting about the past to really enjoy the now. And that is my loss, because someday the future will stop coming. Someday, there will no longer be a now.

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