Thursday. It’s a little after 6 am. I’ve already messed up the timing of everything. I overslept and have too many things I want to do or need to do and the clock is ticking away. My mind is backing out my schedule for the morning. I have a 9am zoom. If I do that from home, it buys me a little time, but if I do it from the office (which I feel I need to do), I need to leave the house at 8 – which means I probably won’t have time to exercise and cool down and write and, and, and….
It’s too early to be having this debate. It’s too early to be playing Tetris with my schedule – put this 15 minute block here, flip that 30 minute block there. Eat, digest, exercise, feed dog, let him digest, walk dog, shower, get ready, chill a bit, make lunch, read news, write, get out the door (not necessarily in that order). I should just take the day off and give in to entropy.
And I’m already losing the battle of time, because I’ve chosen to write about this nonsense as opposed to actually doing any of these things. Stop. The more I think about it, the daily battles we all have with time (or at least I think we all have) isn’t nonsense. I suspect, for many of us, it can be a source of stress and anxiety, or petty frustration, but it doesn’t have to be. Time, and how we spend it, is tied into all of these other aspects of our lives (fulfillment, obligation, joy, happiness/unhappiness, resentment, rest, awe, and expectations). How we choose to spend our time is, at the most basic level, the only choice we ever make in life – tens, if not hundreds of times, a day – quite often without deliberation, quite often “forced.” We use phrases like “I have to do this…” but very few of the things we do are things we have to do.
This mental juggling of time and my many modest desires is my morning – almost every morning. Two hours isn’t enough time to fit all of it in – which is why I try, though often fail, to get up an hour earlier at 5. In fact, I’m looking at the clock now. I have half an hour of my two hours left and still need to shower and make my lunch. I’ve written four or five other paragraphs that are garbage and won’t be used. I took a break to walk the dog and do the dishes. I skipped exercising. The fact that a full hour to hour and a half has gone by makes me feel slow and inefficient (like a turtle, or maybe a sloth). I (perhaps we) have been trained to think about life from a time-management perspective… that if we work a little harder, practice a little more discipline, we might somehow wrangle this beast to the ground and make it obey… and while we’re trying to figure out how best to “manage” it, time does exactly what time always does – move on and on and on.
There’s an undercurrent (actually a few of them) running through my head as I think about my overly-scheduled and inefficient mornings. I don’t really like being overly-scheduled or routine driven or inefficient. I also don’t like that I have to try to be efficient and do this before that if I want to have any hope of getting it all in. I resent it. Vacation and weekend mode Matt is far more enjoyable than daily grind Matt. The few times my friend Stacy and I traveled together, she said she would see a completely different side of me – really laid back and just chill. She got to see beach week me, go with the flow me. I happen to like that side of me, but in the day-to-day bustle, I have trouble finding him among all the noise. I suspect a lot of us have that problem. That’s one of the undercurrents – losing ourselves to the outside pressures of the world. The other undercurrent is the stinging words texted from an ex after things ended. She said she hated the way we lived together. When I’m pressed for time like this and can’t seem to squeeze it all in – I kinda hate living with me too. I feel uptight and hurried and closed off to all of the possibilities that an unstructured life presents… and when in that mood, those words play over and over. With her, I tried to squeeze in as much “us time” as possible which put pressure on everything else (work time, friend time, free time, down time, time time).
As much as that comment stung, I remind myself that “letting go” of expectations, of schedules, of desires, of time is a practice… and an imperfect one at that. Almost all of my best moments and memorable encounters have been when I’ve lost all sense of time. In a world where we don’t have to do anything it helps to understand that we have a choice in where we put our attention and the urgency with which we move. I am constantly learning that there’s a beauty in not being efficient, in taking detours and wandering the aisles, in not trying to schedule what comes next, much less how to like it. I’ve learned this best through travel, my interactions with strangers, and a handful of deep relationships with people who showed me a different way. Absent those things, I sometimes need to remind myself that even busyness or feeling pressed for time is as much a choice as getting lost in time. Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, understood this well and frequently explored the notion of getting unstuck in time.
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something.
Vonnegut interview in Inc.