Nov 1: On Time & Starting Over
If you're anything like me, you find at least a little inspiration in what I like to call the ‘turn of the page. The first of the month, the first day of your week, or weekend, January 1, an empty inbox, the first page in a new journal. I’m very much a planner. Scheduled organized. I’m also very much a slow church person, and I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. Time and how we spend it, the passage of time and how we view progress, anticipating the future and why we make goals, why any of this even matters.
In this video author John Green reflects on his own relationship with time and productivity through the lens of some musings from Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life. He pulls the often repeated line “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
Which, at least to me, felt pretty obvious, because of course the things that we do on any given day ultimately make up what we do with our life. It’s basic math.
day x 7 = week
week x 52 = year
year x ~78 = life
But then she goes on to say that,
“a schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time,”
and the planner in me was wholly offended because as far as I’m concerned, protecting ones time from chaos is a good thing, and not at all something that we should be equating to overwork.
In fact, it’s my schedule that keeps me in line and allows me to make time for the things that I would call my life’s work alongside the things that i consider a part of a day’s work. That, my friend, is balance. Despite the fact that I wanted to just close the tab, I kept reading, and ultimately she makes her main point about the dangers of holding too closely to a schedule and says that after all of that
“… you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
And THIS is where she got me. She wasn’t telling me to throw away my planner and delete all of my alarms and automations. She’s talking about caring more about how you spend your time than what you do with it.
The days that I do the least are the ones that I remember most despite not having a written record of them like i do the ones that are planned, and scheduled, full. And this brought me back to why I’m such a planner and how that interacts with my commitment to slowing down, the danger of becoming so focused on the big picture that I’m actually losing the details that make it visible. The idea that focusing TOO MUCH on what you do in a day can actually take so much of the joy and beauty out of what you’re doing with your life.
And that made me wonder, why do we hold so tightly to our concept of time this way? And it really is just the concept, it’s not even actually about the time itself, because if it was about the time itself, we’d focus more on how the days add up, and how time passes, we’d have a societal structure that recognizes that time and energy commitments are intrinsically relational, instead of professors and managers who pile things on us like their projects are the only ones on our plate. We also wouldn’t have an epidemic of people working themselves into the ground to live paycheck to paycheck, if that.
Our values don’t match our standards and they do it in a way that makes it so hard to even see what’s happening. I have friends who’ve been talking about the positive lifestyle changes that they’re going to make in 2022 since like April. And i’m not talking about ‘once things are different and it’s safe i’m gonna...’ but very much a ‘this is a positive lifestyle change that I’d like to make but since this year has already started I’ve gotta wait until next January 1st.”
And we do this all the way down, miss one assignment and the entire class is ruined, have one shitty week, there goes the entire month, having a bad morning and deciding that the day is ruined, or if you’re 2015 Rihannon, i’m going to be 5 minutes late to this thing, should i even go?
One of the best resources that i’ve ever been given, was a reset button. As much as i wish it were an actual invention that would allow me to start my day over, the reset button is a reminder that before I throw the day, or week, or whatever away I have to:
Pause and figure out what emotion it is that I’m feeling. Did something devastating actually happen? Or am i just overwhelmed? Tired? Dehydrated?
Ask myself why it feels like this moment is the moment that strips the value from everything else about today, or this project, or whatever. Is it actually irreparably broken? No? What have I already accomplished?
Decide to start over, which on the outside, usually looks more like “to keep going” than “to start over” but who’s really keeping track? I figure out my next step, what small thing can I do?
My current favorite form of the reset is to make a list of everything that I’ve done that day, big or small, and compare it to what’s left on the list? or to the scope of the thing that I didn’t get done or do right. Some days it’s a longer than i expected list full of little things that didn’t even make my actual to-do list and others it’s:
woke up,
got out of bed
changed my mind
got back in bed
made this list
and that’s good too.
The reset is doesn’t give me back anything, it doesn’t always bring back my motivation and i’d say about 40% of the time even after a reset I walk away and call it a day but that day doesn’t have to be filed away as a bad one. What the reset does is keep me from giving away the time that I still have. It let’s me pick up the pen and start a new paragraph without having to erase everything that came before it which is exhausting and, think about what an eraser does to a clean page. When you scale out and look at the big picture, i guess makes my days less blurry.
<3,
ri
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