A catalog of time

Or why you didn't get a newsletter yesterday

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You’d think now that I’m on break and all my grades are turned in that I’d have all the time in the world to write my newsletter. And yet, Monday came—the usual day for my newsletter—and no newsletter was written. No newsletter was sent. Sometimes that how it goes.

I’m trying this break to lean hard into rest. I tell myself this is how I always approach breaks, but this is a lie. Here’s the honest version of how all my convoluted thinking goes around breaks.

During the semester, I’m always lamenting that I don’t have more time for writing. If I just had more time, I tell myself, I’d have a novel published by now. I’d have published in that one magazine I’ve always dreamed of getting an acceptance from. I’d be making money hand over fist as a freelance writer. The fantasies are varied in their connection to actual reality or even what I really want, but they all center on this belief that with more time for writing, everything would be better.¹

Then the break comes and—ta-da!—there is in fact more time. “Okay,” I say to myself. “You’re always grousing about all the shit you’d get done if you had more time for writing, so you better do it now or…you’re clearly a loser.” (Yes, my inner voice is not very nice. I’m working on it.)

So then I make lists of all the things I will get done over the break. These lists are not particularly realistic or fun or, you know, restful. Every moment I’m not writing feels like a failure and proof of the lie that more time is not the problem. I’m the problem. And I do cross some items off my list, but it’s never enough and what I don’t do much of is…rest.

This year I had a breakthrough and it all has to do with the nature of time.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

When I’m always wishing for more time to write, what I’m really imagining is not the 4 weeks that come at the end of a long semester and right before another one. This time is bookended and finite. The time I’m imagining is, I don’t know, let’s call it free-range time. It’s time that is not delimited by the start and end of semesters. Really, it’s retirement time. It’s time that stretches out ahead of me with no real end in sight except for death.

In that sort of time, the only urgency is aging, decline and death. Will I write everything I want to write before I lose the ability to string a sentence together?

The time I have when I’m on break, whether it’s over the holidays or the summer, is not the same. There is an urgency to that time, an extended version of what you feel on the weekend—that everything must get done and now. The sense that if I don’t get enough done in those weeks, I have failed on some sort of promise to myself.

Yeah, I know, it all sounds sort of strange and masochistic, doesn’t it?

I have no idea if I’ll ever get that free-range time. That good time with nothing on the horizon. I hope so, but nothing’s guaranteed. And I’d guess that even if I do, there will be something about it that feels imperfect and tainted. Maybe the biggest struggle we face as humans is what the hell to do with these chunks of time that are all limited and its beyond me to figure it out.

What I do know is that I’m trying to do the break differently this time. Okay, I’m still making lists, but they’re really, really short. Like two items per day. I’m letting myself not write every day if I don’t want to. I’m doing actual fun things, like making Tarot flash cards and reading and seeing friends and taking day trips and napping.

This break is finite, but I’m pretending it’s not. Maybe that contradiction is at the heart of figuring out how to do this whole time thing right.

1. It goes without saying maybe that this is a misguided belief. The truth is that you can only spend so much of your day writing. Because your mind becomes exhausted. Your body becomes exhausted. I mean, I guess in some sort of fugue state I could write for 12 hours a day. I think I’d be seriously putting my health and sanity at risk, though.