Our Toys, and the Time We Have Left

A place to cultivate thoughts, looking out toward another kind of garden.

Across the river from Kurt’s little room, his neighbor Mr. Suzuki is planting a winter garden.

He bought the empty plot beside his house and, over several months, reclaimed it from the wild. A company came in to clear the bamboo. Now there is open ground, a rototiller, a shovel, and some potted plants. Where a thicket stood, a garden is beginning.

The man appears prosperous. He has a beautiful home and a nice car. Kurt guesses that he is in his mid-sixties, perhaps four or five years older than himself, and thinks he may have recently retired. These are impressions from across the water, not the whole story of another man’s life.

Across the river, Mr. Suzuki tends his garden.

On this side of the river, another kind of cultivation is underway. Kurt sits with his computer, tending thoughts and ideas gathered over a lifetime of endeavors. The opening photograph shows the small, ordinary setting: a screen in the foreground, pots on the balcony, laundry hanging in the sunlight, and greenery beyond the railings.

One man has soil to work. The other has thoughts to work over.

Both have their toys.

There need be no contempt in that word. A shovel can be a toy without ceasing to be a useful shovel. A computer can be one even when the work done on it is serious. These are the things we gather around ourselves because they give our curiosity somewhere to go. Some are bought. Others take decades to acquire: a skill, a way of looking, an interest that survives all the changes in our circumstances.

Perhaps one of the quieter pleasures of growing older is finally having some room to play with what life has put into our hands. Not everything has to become a career, prove our worth, or lead to something larger. A winter garden may be a winter garden. A thought may be worth working through even if it never becomes a book.

Experience tempers the play. We may have learned something about what our tools can do, what deserves our effort, and where our enthusiasm outruns our ability. Wisdom, when we manage a little of it, can make our ambitions more particular. This patch of ground. This question. Something small enough to attend to properly.

And around it all is the atmosphere of mortality.

Not necessarily a fright, or even a thought held continuously in mind. More a quality of the air in which the work takes place. We can be absorbed in an ordinary task while knowing, somewhere just behind that attention, that the time available to us is finite. The things we have gathered and the time in which to enjoy them are not the same kind of possession. We can add another tool. We cannot put another lifetime beside this one.

That knowledge makes the toys look smaller. It also makes the use of them more delicate. There is something faintly absurd about finally assembling the means to occupy ourselves just as we become more conscious of how briefly we will be here to use them.

Of course, nothing in the gardener’s movements tells Kurt what the man thinks about death. He may be thinking only about his plants. The sense of two lives winding down belongs to the observer’s reflection; it is not something he can read across the river.

Still, the resemblance remains. A garden outside, a cultivation of ideas within. Different tools, different histories, and a small amount of ground on which to exercise whatever understanding the years have brought.

Calling these pursuits insignificant does not quite settle their value. They are insignificant against the scale of what will outlast us. Yet that does not remove the interest of the task in front of us. The sadness and the pleasure can occupy the same moment. Neither has to explain the other away.

Across the river, the man is planting his winter garden. In the little room, Kurt is gathering this thought into words. The toys are close at hand. The time is less certain.

For now, there is cultivation on both sides of the water.