Work, and I mean my paycheck labor out in the world, has been running me to ground this week. I have had to backfill all my posts about creative time and - to tear the fourth wall of bloggery down - I had to backfill the time itself. I stole moments Saturday to pay Friday, and so on.
I reckon this though as another moment of symmetry for the purpose of this blog and our experiment in deliberate living. I know I've spent the last year tracking down time to write and make music like an ungainly hunter. like wolves that just chase an elk until it falls over. It isnt beautiful, but it works enough of the time to get something done. Anyway, I last year I wrote stories, worked on a novel, poetry and music, but I did it with the unimpressive tactics of the wolf.
You may want to leap to the defense of wolves. They are fine animals and I am not really meaning to get hung up on them...and how much they are the bullies of the animal world, and kind of good looking cowards.
Right, but, this January was a time of deliberate time. I think it is an odd turn of phrase when people talk about "finding time" as though it were laying around somewhere (in which case I would steal it from those inattentive guppies in an instant and without regret...a man who finds time isnt likely to put it to any better use than one who finds money). I don't like the notion of "making time" any better, as though one's godlike hubris is going to rend the fabric of the universe asunder and allow you to sit, while water droplets hang in the air, and write at the moving point of a frozen world. Sure its a figure of speech, I get it...but don't like it. But this January, rather than being the layabout blowing his dollar at the arcade, the master of time and space, or just a bully wolf, we fought very deliberately for 30 minutes each day. Mostly we won.
It changes the way you think about finding making or hunting time, to have done a thing like that with forethought. We picked a ringer of a month though. It depressed me at first when I realized how hard it was for us to find just 30 minutes, and I wondered if I had even spent that much time per session of writing in the last year. But upon reflection, this was just a rough month. So, we did it anyway and I am very proud of the result.
I think the real challenge of this year is going to be to keep making certain, when faced with incoming months that could be as rough as this one, I find at least the same time to keep working.
If and when I finish my novel this year, I will be sure to mention it here, and see how well I kept that time in order.
Onward to February.
R:
I started on my next painting.
I suppose it is also fitting that I reflect on our first month here. I absolutely loved having in mind that these 30 minutes must be fit in. It helped me to orient my days a little bit better: if we were having a guest over for dinner, I knew I wouldn't be able to have my time in the evening, and so organized the kids to be busy while I could be as well. It was really nice to have Spoon up painting next to me while I painted. More than this however, it helped me to realize how many 30 minutes I wasted checking email and scrolling through my Google Reader. Now don't get me wrong, I am not going to stop checking either one of those things! But it's even more satisfying to check them in bulk than to briefly glance for a couple minutes here and there. And meanwhile I have larger chunks to devote to reading, actually sitting down with my kids, or being creative. Not only have I already painted more paintings than all of last year, but I have knitted, read, written letters and blog posts, and had guests over for dinner--all of which had been shunted aside by not consolidating my use of the internet (primarily) and watching movies (secondarily).
I have been listening to The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr while I cook or clean up the kitchen this month. It's been oddly apt with the consideration of time this month. The brain is affected by what we choose to do or even what we think. Making choices in what you spend time thinking about actually affects the capacities of your brain. Carr writes about how deep reading (and I would add to this--any focussed creative activity), actually grows the capacity of your brain to engage the world when not reading.
"'The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was passed on in turn to the reader,' writes Eisenstein. Like painters and composers, writers were able to 'alter perception' in a way 'that enriched rather than stunted sensuous response to external stimuli, expanded rather than contracted sympathetic response to the varieties of human experience.' The words in books didn't just strengthen people's ability to think abstractly; they enriched people's experience if the physical world, the world outside the book."
The brain wants to repeat patterns that it develops.
I have found that just like with working out--I feel more energetic having expended energy--the same to be true with leisure time. If I sit and watch a movie because I am just too tired to do anything else, I end up going to be feeling even more sluggish and restless. When I would actually just make myself sit down and paint or draw or read for 30 minutes or more, or then watch a movie, my enjoyment of the movie was increased, and I felt less tired and sluggish over all.
I hope to continue this good pattern of devoting more focussed attention to the small amounts of time during the day--perhaps alternating more between reading, writing, and being creative in other ways, rather than just limiting it to creativity. I will not try and make myself do this on the weekends though!
After devoting a month to re-focussing my attention, I am looking forward to developing the capacity of listening without images: February!
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