Time (gratitude and greed)
Rough #2
Written: 2020-09-22
Published: 2021-04-30
From my journal: 22 September 2020 (Tuesday)
Time is the first topic today for a couple reasons.
First, it was one of the things that came to me last night as I was on my way to bed. Here’s what I captured to WorkFlowy:
Time is soft, mutable, sometimes malleable — bend it to your will, turn it off every so often. Use it — don’t let it use you. Life in a day on an ultra, minutes like hours during your late night thrashing about in search of sleep.
And that’s where I stopped, even though there is clearly much more to say. I didn’t quote Thoreau (“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”) and I didn’t talk about whether time is real or not, or what it’s nature really is, and I didn’t say how to do the things I advise. How do you bend time to your will? How do you turn it off every so often? There is so much more to write here.
The other reason for talking about time right now is that I was just fretting about how long things take me and how quickly the blocks of time I give to things go by.
Yesterday was a well-executed day, and it wasn’t nearly enough.
I started with a 2-hour block of writing, right on schedule, and at the end of that I had nothing but a journal entry to show for it, and most of that was just rambling, nothing that was remotely publishable or that even moved me in that direction. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t important, or that the time was wasted — the journal serves many, many purposes, and work towards publishable writing is just one of them (and not the primary one). I used the time to write my way through my running plans, mainly. And in the process I also got more practice in writing, and typing and thinking out loud, and those are good things that are hard to overdo. But even so, in a flash those 2 hours were gone, and I moved on.
Next I did a 2-hour admin block in which I wrestled with my new version of Quicken, finding my way through new processes and new ways of handling our accounting. And again, those 2 hours were gone in a flash, with much accomplished, but much more left to do, and the time gone.
Then I spent an hour and a half outside clearing brush. It was wonderful time, perfect weather, the kind of work where something visible is produced (or in this case, kind of the inverse of that) and you can see as well as feel the accomplishment. But the same thing — much more left to do, and I didn’t want to stop, but I knew that to have time for the run I wanted (the run I wrote my way into earlier in the day), I had to put the tools down, leave the rest of that job, and switch myself over to PT mode.
I did that, and I got my run in (an 11-mile starfish in the Barrens that went really well), and to celebrate that (and since Renee was having her supper at work, as usual for a Monday night) I stopped at McDonald’s on the way home (probably undoing at least half of the goodness that might otherwise have flowed from the run, sadly), and when I got home I sat down to read while I ate.
By the time I was done with that, when I’d earlier thought I might get back to the accounting, I was completely out of admin mode and into reading/writing mode. I went to the easy chair with my book (Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter), let Scotia curl up on my lap under a blanket, and I sat there reading until Renee got home.
The rest of the night went to watching Away on Netflix (and a very short Headspace session).
So a full day, a good day, not much of it wasted, nearly all of it engaged in things I’d either choose to do or that I’ve decided are important to do. A day well-balanced between the work I love (the writing and the reading), the work I do to responsibly maintain a household (the accounting), the work I do to keep my head straight as a manual-labor complement to my writing (the brush clearing), the work I do to keep myself healthy and competent (the running and the meditation), and a small bit of family social time. What part of that would I leave out? What of it was wasted? Nothing.
I only want more of all of it.
I want the entire day for writing and reading, to get beyond the journal entry and into my next post to the website and then on to the book I’m (supposedly) working on, and to finish Pale Horse, Pale Rider and get on to the next selection (I want to read all the books).
But I also I want to go to the computer and figure out my new Quicken software from top to bottom and process all of our transactions and finish the monthly process, get completely caught up on the entire mess (and make it so that it’s no longer a mess).
I want to go on that brush-clearing mission until I’m too tired to stand, until I can’t cut another branch of honeysuckle or pull out another strand of bittersweet vine. I want no time-pressure on my runs, no gathering darkness that calls me home, no supper to get to or bedtime to constrain me.
Mainly I want more time for each of these things, every day.
I’m passionate about each of them, I’ve chosen each of them (yes, even the accounting, at least as a necessary evil that I’m streamlining each time I work on it). They each make my life better in their own way.
Now we’re to the heart of the conflict.
None of those things are finite. The writing is obviously open-ended, but so is the rest of it. There will always be another book waiting to be read, another show to watch. When that brush is cleared along the driveway, it will need to be re-cleared along the other edge of the lot, and the lawn will need mowed and the leaves will need blown. I could end the running at any time, but when I do, I’ll surely substitute some other activity that takes just as much time and dedication, whether that’s biking or floating or forest-bathing. Each of these things is open ended and effectively infinite.
I, on the other hand, am finite, tragically finite.
I’ve become good at “filling the unforgiving minute with sixty second’s worth of distance run” and I’ve somehow found my way to a pretty good life, and maybe that’s all I should be expecting.
And there’s the glitch (I caught myself). I shouldn’t be expecting anything — it’s all a gift, not an entitlement.
I’d be a better and happier person if I could keep gratitude at the front as my primary emotion (with a healthy sense of wonder as the main manifestation of that gratitude), rather than the greed I was just entertaining myself with.
Maybe that’s the ultimate test for a (capital-H) Human: that we must find a balance between that gratitude for what we have and that greed for more of it. To somehow be both satisfied and searching at the same time, to reconcile our gifts against our hunger.
I have no recipe for that.
There are plenty of wise and powerful platitudes for it, that we should live each day as our last, that we should live in the moment. But they are what-to-dos, not how-to-dos. The truly hard and important parts are internal, and beyond the reach of platitudes, maybe beyond words. I think we must each find our own way to them.
Treat those wise sayings as aspirations, yes, and try to keep them present in your mind through the course of your activities across the day. Run with them, write your way through them (as I’m doing right now), keep them in the background of everything you do.
But look for insights, not answers, because it could be that there are no answers, that insights, bits and pieces of the truth, glimpses of it, will have to do.