Turtle Time

For my birthday, a friend who knows me well gave me a copy of Sy Montgomery’s wonderful book Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell. I have a thing for turtles and their slow, measured pace through life.

Back when I ran a marketing department for a small college, I used to give my staff little turtle figurines as a reminder to take the time to do the job right, to avoid spending twice the time fixing it. They loved the concept and permission to go slower in a society obsessed with speed.

I can’t say I always follow my own advice, but I have a collection of turtles in my home office to remind me. From Montgomery, I’ve learned more about these prehistoric creatures, how they are gentle (even snappers are much less dangerous than their stereotypes), steadfast, and determined, somehow managing for millennia to beat incredible odds against their survival. Beyond natural predators, our modern world has compounded those risks with cars that speed across turtle nesting pathways, pollution and development that destroys habitats, and climate change that affects the gender of incubating turtle embryos, to name just a few.

Still, in their own plodding way, turtles persist.

Rescue organizations help, as much as they can, and their volunteers are incredibly dedicated. Montgomery takes you into this world of rescuers, in beautiful prose that inspires. In a chapter about her efforts to help release turtle hatchlings back into their native environment, near a busy highway that pregnant turtles must cross to lay their eggs, she writes:

Two kinds of time exist side by side: the frenzied, fleeting, harried time, rushing along like the cars on the interstate, and the eternal, cyclical, renewing time of the seasons. The turtles traverse them both. Following them to the world just outside the highway guardrails, we enter the embrace of the wild, beating heart of nature, escaping for a moment from the trap of transience.

As the pace of our lives urges us to move ever faster, faster, it feels so good to settle down with a wonderful book about turtles, downshift, and breathe. May you have a slow, peaceful, reflective day.

Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.