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THE ENDLESS WINTER: The Temporal Experience of Compassion Fatigue Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time” Understanding Time Our lives are made up of various times. We go through childhood, adolescence , middle and old age. We live through events that mark our time. There is the time when I was in school; then there is the time after I graduated but before I moved to Vancouver. In some ways, we seem to carry time bodily. I notice how the child playing in the park is living her childhood, while my adult body occupies, embodies, my adulthood and soon will evince my old age. Even more simply: today I am 43, last year I was 42, and next year I will be 44; numbers attested to, if not by physical feeling, then by the identification I keep in my wallet. Time marks the passage of our lives. This birthday, that Christmas, the New Year, the first blooms of spring. And time itself is marked by these moments. Our days, our weeks, our years are made up of these shared markers.1 Minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year. Time, like few other things, seems to define our lives. We get up according to the clock. There is work time and home time. Our children have playtime, naptime, and bedtime. There is the specific time when the bus arrives and the time when it is late. And we tend to pay our taxes just in time. These times are not quite as set, not quite as encompassing or 86 The Endless Winter: The Temporal Experience of Compassion Fatigue expansive as the ages we pass through, yet they are no less powerful in our experience of time. Simply ask any parent whose two-year-old has missed her afternoon nap, or the university student who has woken up late for an exam. These times form the shape of our lived days. However much our lives are measured by or made up of defined stretches and moments in time, we also live through specific times. We might anticipate the birth of a child, or anxiously await the phone call that offers us employment. We may suffer through a time of mourning, or wait, endlessly, to hear our medical test results. These moments in time differ from those marked on the clock or by the routines (or missed routines ) of everyday life. These times are rarely set, nor will we all experience them. Moreover, they may not even be visible to another person. But these are moments in time that are often deeply lived—by the woman who will always remember the birth of her child, and by the man who wishes he could forget his diagnosis. These experiences of time are individual, private moments notable less for the span they cover than the meaning they carry. We can begin to see how time is central to our experience of our world, even if we rarely stop to consider it. Time is so central to our lives that it has the power to alter the very events we live through. The phrase “time flies when you’re having fun” is true (subjectively, if not objectively); ask anyone who, caught up in the moment, fails to notice that it is now time to stop, to go home, back to the routine of life. We more readily notice how time slows to a snail’s pace when we find we must trudge through yet another boring, dutiful task. This time is endless. It is the time we wish would move more quickly, the time when we wonder if there really is some objective measure of the curious thing we call time because it is never ever ending. That is, until it does. Time, then, is a strange thing, defined both objectively (by the clock) and subjectively (by our experience of the clock). In some ways, we can only see how time appears by looking back on it, after it has occurred. We might say, “I had fun last night” or “that was a horrible period in my life.” But when we attempt to grasp time as it is lived in the here and now, it slips through our...

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