About Time
I’ve been sick this week, the kind of sick that sucks up time like a labrador retriever does meals. I spent a couple of days groaning and sleeping and feeding my kids unhealthy snacks which thrilled them so they ran off with their loot and left Mama to groan some more. Not related to sickness, exactly, but I also have several half-finished essays sitting on this very laptop, ones that I tremble to finish or pitch since this has been a long and not-very-profitable road, and I’m feeling a tiny bit besieged and mopey about it. Reading about writing is tedious, I know, but humor me for a moment – what does one do when time has been irrevocably spent on an effort that might be going nowhere? In my case, apparently, I leave projects half-finished and scribble inspired notes to myself on the back of credit card statements, which I struggle to decipher later, and remember exactly what brilliance I was trying to capture.
Right after Christmas I went to the memorial service for a dear friend’s mother. Of course we think about time differently when it’s over – we have to account for how we spend it, what it’s for, who we share it with. I often think of time as a pie, as a finite amount of goodness that must be percentaged out – this much for work, this much for friends, etc. It’s tempting to want each of these time-slices to really pay off, to be the best gosh-darn piece of pie you ever savored, to inspire you to sail the world or fall in love or write the next Great American Novel.
Every piece of pie can’t be the best or brightest, just like us mortals need to have sick days and veg-out days and coffee-at-6-pm days. So why am I so bothered by a few failures, a few rejections, a few unnoticed efforts?
Darned if I know. If you thought you were coming here for an answer I’m sorry, this post is going to be heavy on metaphor and light on precision.
But I can tell you that going to that memorial, spending seven hours one day in the car to support my friend, was worth it. These days of sending out my little manuscripts, with metaphorically inky fingers and hopeful heart (ala Jo March, my hero!) reading The Little Blue Truck to a squirmy toddler, doing all the daily chores that make our farmhouse a home and not just a shelter, offering my whole self to my job and my friends and my husband, it’s all worth it.
Speaking of time, Adam and I will be married 11 years this weekend. We’re going to spend several hours together on Saturday night, with no kids and no interruptions and a meal worth savoring, because, in the end, time isn’t a pie or a payoff or a plan – time isn’t an appliance or an asset. Time is how we say “I love you.”