Making Peace with the Time We Have

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I have been thinking a lot lately about time. This is partly because over the past fifteen months I have seen three lives cut short–two by alcohol, one by cancer. It is partly because I am in my forties and I’m due for some mid-life melancholy and reflection on what I’ve done with my life so far and what I might still accomplish. And it is partly because I am purposefully slowing my publishing pace after turning in my sixth novel manuscript to my editor last month.

As I transition from a rather lengthy season of frantic activity, interrupted only briefly and incompletely by a global pandemic (I say incompletely because I never stopped working, I probably increased the number of events I was involved in through the expanded use of Zoom, and I was also under deadline the entire time), I have been trying to stop the spinning wheels of my brain and imagine a different pace of life and a different set of priorities.

I’ve been asking myself questions. What is the best use of my time? What time of day is best for what activity? How hard should I push to get through the (rather lengthy) household to-do lists I’ve written? How can I retrieve the person I once was–the person to whom it would never occur to question whether a few hours spent ambling around a forest was “wasted” time? Is that unhurried, in-tune-with-herself person still in there somewhere? That girl who never felt guilty about leaving her chores undone?

Because I miss her.

 

 

Some months ago I was reading How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now by James K. A. Smith. I underlined a lot of lines in that book. Lines like:

“Our past is not what we’ve left behind; it’s what we carry….We are called to live forward, given our history, bearing both its possibilities and its entanglements.”

“The horizons that circumscribe you are not fencing you out of something but entrusting you to this field of possibility. What’s thrown your way is what you can do.”

“Some years are longer than others.”

“Seasons can be expected and are something that befall us rather than something we bring on. It is important to recognize this so we don’t confuse a season with our identity, nor imagine that a season is either a reward or a punishment…. We can’t hasten either their arrival or their end.”

During Lent I have spent some time reading another book, In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace by Jen Pollock Michel. Again, I underlined a lot (this is why I can’t get books from the library). From Michel, I took things like:

“Here’s what productivity and efficiency and time management fail to get right. The hours, like our bodies, like the world, aren’t under our control.”

“I come to learn what it means to receive the offering of another’s unhurried presence.”

“People forget love is a project of forbearance, a waiting with and waiting out. If transformation is slow in us, why can’t it also be slow in others?”

“Self-help is an industry that enthrones the self, and though this can at times feel empowering, it’s ultimately defeating. Your problems are always yours to solve through your efforts and cunning and self-discipline. Self-improvement is an exhausting, thriving business.”

“Living the Lord’s time is always a resistance movement. We will not find joy…in the three sirens of consumerism: comfort, control, and convenience….We don’t lack joy simply because we’re running too fast. It’s that we are hurrying past life and the ‘resonant’ encounters we might have with it.”

 

 

Though Smith is denser and more philosophical and Michel is grounded more in the day-to-day experience of life, I recommend both to those who are seeking to find some healthy third way, beyond the cult of productivity and hustle and that of endless slack-jawed social media scrolling. Both recognize that the way many of us have been thinking about our time is deeply self-focused and at the same time (ironically) self-destructive.

Both of these books continually come around to the admonition to number our days, to remember that we will die, that our time here is finite. But neither author then comes to the conclusion you might think obvious–namely, if time is finite I better pack as much as possible into the time I have, whether in amusements and experiences or in productive labor that will make a positive change in the world.

Yes, each admits, we are bound in some ways by linear time. We are born, we live, and we die, never knowing which will be our last day. But instead of rushing us along to the next thing on our to-do list or bucket list, Smith and Michel instead speak of attitudes of anticipation, participation, reflection, and, incredibly, contentment. These feel like things I want to have in my life. These feel like rhythms I could maintain.

Maybe like me you have a long list of projects around the house that should get done. Or maybe you have a five-year plan you’re trying put into action (or resuscitate after it was stymied by COVID). Or maybe you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs with absolutely no idea what to do with your time. In any case, it’s worth taking the time to really think about how we want to spend our limited time here.

Time is so often seen as our enemy as we are continually looking for more of it, running out of it, keeping an eye on it. But our time, however long it is, is a gift to us. How much better to make peace with it and learn how to live within its bounds, hold our plans lightly, and continually look to our Creator for the wisdom and grace to use it well. Not to use it up, to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of it. But to enjoy it.

 

Rediscovering the Power of Idleness

Posted on by Erin Bartels

In the second episode of Mad Men, Roger Sterling walks into Don Draper’s office and says, “I can never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing.”

As both a professional copywriter and a novelist, I knew exactly what that meant. Creative work, whether you’re coming up with sales angles and headlines or plot twists and character arcs, requires marination — periods of time in which the writer looks like they are doing nothing at all when in reality there is a whole hell of a lot going on behind the scenes, as it were.

Whether lying on the fabulous mid-century modern couch in your swank NYC office, taking long walks in the woods, or just staring into space at your desk, “doing nothing” is important. It looks to all the world like idleness — laziness, even — especially to those with more visibly active jobs. But it isn’t.

I was recently talking with a friend whose kids are intensely scheduled — school, music lessons, sports, and other extracurricular activities, one right after another, nearly every day of the week. I felt exhausted just listening to her list them all out. When I commented on how that seemed like a lot for a kid to do, she responded that otherwise her son got bored. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that her son will do something amazing with his life (and knowing his parents, I’m sure of it) but that thing will not be becoming a writer.

From my earliest days, I was a “lazy” child. After having had an extremely active (maybe even hyperactive) first baby who climbed and ran and tumbled all over the place, my worried mother actually asked the pediatrician if there was something wrong with little Erin, who spent most of her time sitting and staring off into space.

“She’s just thinking,” was his wonderful reply. And I guess I was.

As a kid I spent a lot of time drawing and reading and sitting in trees, all activities that allowed me to do a lot of thinking. Sure, I played sports and acted in plays and played an instrument as I got older, but most of the time, I preferred to just observe and think. I was never bored. I was never looking for more to do. In fact, I was really good at doing nothing at all, which, as I grew up, I realized not everyone can do.

My childhood talent for idleness came from my father, who loved nothing more after a long day at work than to turn the stereo up loud, sit down, and listen with eyes closed, drink in hand. He wasn’t someone who always had a bunch of projects going. He wasn’t going off to parties or performances. He liked being home and relaxing by himself. I can’t imagine him ever feeling lonely or bored during these times.

I certainly didn’t get my talent for doing nothing from my mother, who couldn’t sit down to watch a movie without also ironing or folding towels or cleaning out her purse. She was the list-maker, the errand-runner, the shopper, the one making dinner and cleaning the house. She was always productive in a way my father and I were not. Nowadays she’s learning to enjoy relaxing with a book (though I suspect she still can’t watch a movie without a sewing project in hand).

As a teenager, my sister jumped at the chance to get a job and earn money that she could spend while out with her friends. I resisted getting a job for as long as I could. I didn’t care about earning money because I didn’t go out with friends. I didn’t care about having a car, going to movies at the theater, going to the mall. Everything I liked to do, I did by myself and none of it cost more than I could earn doing chores around the house (which I would always put off until the last possible moment).

I was lazy and content.

Then at some point, perhaps once I was done with college, I turned into my mother.

With just a job and no school, I suddenly had a bunch of empty time to fill and a bit more money to spend. I began making lists and thinking up little projects and shopping for stuff I didn’t need. I started hobbies — scores of them — and filled my time with stuff to do. I still didn’t care to do the stuff that actually needed doing — like cleaning and laundry and grocery shopping — but by golly I made a lot of cards and jewelry and quilts.

I kept busy and I somehow got the notion into my head that any recreational time I had should be productive. That there should be some visible result or product of anything I did. Something to show for my time. I have no earthly idea where this notion came from. It certainly wasn’t a concept I was raised with. My parents never told me that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

Maybe it was just the natural result of reading DIY magazines. Maybe I spent too much time at Michael’s and Jo-Ann’s. Maybe it was just living long enough in a frenetic, get-ahead-or-get-left-behind culture. I have no clue. But somehow I had lost the white space in my life. And while my twenties may have been extremely productive years in terms of things created, they were barren years in terms of creative thinking. They were years I thought about how I’d like to write . . . and yet didn’t write a word worth reading.

Lately I’ve been reclaiming my down time, from both responsibilities to others by quitting a few activities and from the arbitrary busyness I have tended to create for myself. I’ve spent entire afternoons reading and not felt guilty about wasting time. I’ve spent entire days closing myself off in a room to write. I’ve spent entire weeks off work without checking my email. I decided that it’s okay for my garden to just be pretty and not productive. It’s okay to binge-watch The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. It’s okay to amble through a park and watch ducks and collect pretty leaves.

Nothing has to come of it all. It’s just pleasant idleness. It’s just enjoying myself, my family, and my world.

And in rediscovering the idleness I was so good at as a child, I find that I am recovering the “empty” time I need in order to write.

“I can never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing,” Roger Sterling said to Don Draper. But he wasn’t doing nothing. He was doing his job, and doing it in such a way that he made his company quite successful.

At the end of our super busy months of September and October, I told my husband that I was not going to say yes to any invitation to go somewhere and do something on any Saturday in November. And except for one Saturday in December, the same conviction holds true. I don’t need the time to do anything specific at home beyond rake the leaves and do the laundry. I need that time to just do nothing. 

I know that to a lot of people this seems kind of rude and selfish and antisocial and lazy. But it really isn’t. My 9-5 job is writing. My avocation is writing. And my writing well is not filled by engaging in activity for activity’s sake. It’s filled by reading, walking, observing, thinking. It’s filled by things that look like nothing.

Writers like Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Wordsworth, Henry Miller, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, C.S. Lewis, Madeline L’Engle, and many others understood the importance of giving the mind room to work by simply taking a walk, and this article has a lot to say about why that is. I heard a speaker at a recent conference relay some advice she had drawn from another writer (whose name escapes me) that “If you aren’t reading so much that you feel guilty about it, you aren’t reading enough.”

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams,” said Virginia Woolf, “that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” And if I, as a writer, intend to be about the business of discerning and presenting truth, I need the time that I need in order to discern it and present it in such a way that the reader experiences it in the most fulsome and lasting way possible.

If you are a writer or a painter or a poet or some other kind of artist who has been feeling guilty about the time required to do your art well, I invite you to join me in recovering and relishing your “idle” times — which of course we know are anything but. Others may not understand, but what they don’t realize is that every time they read a book or watch a movie or listen to a song that speaks to them, they’re enjoying the result of someone else’s strategic idleness.