One of my many favorite Emily Dickinson poems is often referred to as “Forever” or Poem #690. I’ve always been particularly fond of her poems that deal with two of her favorite themes, time and mortality. But this poem contains a line that has haunted me since I first read it, not for its beauty, but for its terrifying precision: “Forever – is composed of Nows.”
For years, I treated this line as a piece of sentimental wisdom, sort of a Victorian version of “carpe diem.” But since moving to Vermont, removed from the artificial urgency of city life and institutional pacing, I’ve come to view it as a strict law of physics. As a notorious recluse, Emily Dickinson understood that “Forever” isn’t a destination. It’s not a distant shoreline where our dreams, debts, and “best selves” are waiting for us. Rather, it’s an infinite accumulation of this exact second.
This realization finally hit me during the raw, muddy friction of a Vermont March, as the winter refuses to leave and the spring struggles to arrive. In that seasonal interim, looking out over our farm, I realized I’d spent thirty-plus years committing a specific kind of sin, one of deferral. I kept treating the present moment as a waiting room for a future that would never actually arrive, because by the time I got there, it would only be another “Now.”
By necessity and nature, I’m mostly a shut-in during the Vermont winter. My nows are rarely an epic hike through the woods that surround the far edge of our property. Most of the time, my view of the world is framed by the glass of our back sunporch. I often stand there, but not with the literary cliché of steaming herbal tea, as neurological issues make hot drinks difficult for me. My typical beverage of choice is either a bottle of iced tea or Body Armor sports drink, watching the physics of the season play out. Then I’ll pace around, gathering my thoughts about what I should do that day, perhaps pecking away at a chore or two in the process.
The soundtrack to my vigil often involves the incessant chittering of little songbirds often joined by the raucous, intelligent argument of the crows that frequent our Rutland County pasture. They dive-bomb the yard, claiming the thaw, dark contrasts against lingering snow. Looking out at this view, which many have told me resembles a protected state park, I realized I had to stop trying to get through the winter to get to the good part. Every “Now” should be the good part.
Such is the practice of what’s best properly termed Pastoral Realism. It’s when you realize that the world moves too fast to be healthy, and the only way to recenter yourself is to slow down the frame rate of your own life. If Forever is truly just a collection of Nows, then rushing through a chore, a video game level, or a conversation with my wife, Emily, is essentially deleting a piece of eternity you can never retrieve.
I used to rush to the grocery store just to get it over with. But now, the drive is the point. I used to power through chores to get to leisure. Really, though, I now prefer to see the maintenance of my life as Life itself. I ask myself constantly: how can I make this specific moment—this cold drink, this gray sky, and this quiet room—more complete? I figure that the better I can make the “Now,” the better my “Forever” becomes.
This is rarely easy work, of course. The sin of deferral is a seductive habit, because it’s always easier to daydream about a perfect, hypothetical summer than to sit in a drafty room in March. But that daydream is a hallucination. The drafty room is real and it’s “Now.” For all I know, “Now” is all I’ll ever get, so I need to appreciate it for what it is.
Gaining such clarity also shatters the “Cottagecore” fantasy many equate with rural Vermont. Essentials aren’t always easy to source locally. Locals sometimes don’t know how to accept a queer couple, occasionally refusing to even acknowledge us. My reality here is frequently inconvenient and socially jagged. But I persist and accept this reality, even when it is uncomfortable, because it’s what it is.
To live as a Pastoral Realist means accepting that the future is only a rumor, an unverified hypothesis people fruitlessly attempt to script. The only real data we have—the only raw material we are given to build a life with—is the current frame.
If I spend my days waiting for the perfect conditions—for my neurological symptoms to vanish, for the winter to finally break, and for the “real” writing to start—I’ll die in the waiting room, unfulfilled and forgotten. I’ll have traded my flawed, vibrant reality for a perfect, non-existent future that dies along with me.
Dickinson didn’t stay in her room because she was hiding, but because she was paying attention. She understood the physics that the rest of us ignore: if you look closely enough at a single second, it expands. It becomes large enough to live in. So, now when I sit at my desk or in bed working on essays, or going to the store with Emily, or watching one of my silly comfort videos in the quiet of the evening, I’m no longer trying to get somewhere else. Instead, I do my best to inhabit the frame I’m in at that very moment. Forever isn’t coming because it’s already here, composing itself one second at a time.