Making Time
“Time is what we want most but what we use worst.” - William Penn
“Don’t waste your time, or time will waste you.” - The Muse - Knights of Cydonia
Time. Tick-tock. The one thing we can’t escape no matter how much we try. It’s all around us and marching on. Whether it’s pressing snooze on an alarm clock which I’m guilty of doing at least 2 times each morning (it makes 6:45AM turn into a 7:30AM mad rush to get ready for work and out the door) or watching weekends fly by while the work week seems to drag on, we are obsessed with time. (Fun tip: brush your teeth in the shower. It saves a couple minutes, and goes down the drain all the same. Just make sure you rinse everything off.)
To have a better sense of time and the illusion of control, we created the clock which has led to some good things like a standard 40-hour workweek and weekends off…at least in my state of Minnesota (or at least some sort of equivalent for those working on weekends and overtime pay to compensate for the time.) We can organize a day and have a mostly stable unit of measurement that can exist beyond the changes in sunlight. We can make routines more stable and predictable.
Not exactly my thoughts on a happy retirement.
Source: Reddit
But with the upsides, there are arguable more downsides. Many people overwork with the tired phrase “time is money.” We sacrifice our well-being which includes sleep with packed schedules where each second is accounted for and not taking the time to savor the spoils of our labor, choosing instead to push the rewards off until retirement. But at that point, time starts to waste us. We grow old, tired, sore, and with sarcopenia bad enough to give anyone looking at us back pain.
We are cursed with time, but we are also blessed with it. What is a universe without time? I argue it’s one without life, growth, decay, or death. What is life without death? The value of something is only as strong as finite it is. If we all lived forever without a concept of death and with an infinite amount of time, there is no FOMO (fear of missing out…something that comes up in marketing plenty.) Without this, what would be the point in most things? What would the point of life be? I’m open to discussion, but in marketing speak, a sale that goes on forever doesn’t have value, does it? It’s just the regular price at that point.
To bring this back to writing, there are plenty of misconceptions to it in relation to time. Writing is not only putting words down on paper or a screen, but it is a thought process that hits at different points in time. I’ll be ready to sleep, and I will mull ideas over in my mind with my story like a scene. This is writing and what happens no matter what, with or without a keyboard at my finger tips or a pen in my hand. The only difference is that it’s made solid in some sort of medium when it’s captured.
Our concept of time is flawed and biased. Overnight successes are never overnight. It takes some writers years of thought, practice, writing, editing, red slips, perceived failures, and finally acceptance either by self-publishing or being chosen by a publisher to get to the perceived point.
We all have 24 hours in a day. But what makes a successful writer different is their use of time. I define success in what you want most in life. For many writers, it’s getting published, making money, getting the story out of their heads and shared with the world, or a combination of everything plus some other things I did not list. Like any form of mastery or fulfillment, it relies on time put into it. If it seems like a waste of time, then the value was in the wrong place or the conceptions of purpose were not in alignment.
I think this is why I like Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s like the old saying of “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” It takes training, practice, patience, and time to get from point A to point Z in anything we do. In some of my English classes in high school, it was a one shot for writing papers or anything that had a creative aspect to it. But writing is exploratory as described by Caroline Donahue in the Simply Write podcast by Polly Campbell which I will embed below:
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read all this. Now, take some time back and do something for you! I’ll probably revisit the concept of time again in the future, but check out this video from Jim Henson all about time.