Lost Time

My daily activities are not unusual. I’m just naturally in harmony with them. Grasping nothing; discarding nothing. Supernatural power and marvelous activity. Drawing water and carrying firewood.  
—Layman Pang (740-808 AD)

Last fall I was having breakfast with a friend. Sally was on several weeks of medical leave after  knee surgery. “What are you doing with your time?” I asked her, thinking of all the fun and productive ways she might be spending the days away from work. The knee surgery, after all, was fairly minor, and she had done well with the recovery. Given the fact that her normal life includes a busy law practice, three teenagers and an active social life, I imagined lunches with friends or closets being cleaned out, afternoon matinees at the movies or home painting projects, books read or soup made. She had told me before the surgery that this would be the first time in her entire adult life she had non-vacation/non-maternal leave time off. She seemed thrilled at the concept.

But that morning, in response to my question, Sally looked despondent. “I have no idea,” she said. “The time is just disappearing, but I have no idea what’s happening to it.”

I murmured sympathetically, and the conversation moved on to other things. Several weeks later I ran into Sally at the grocery store. “How are you?” I asked. “Angry,” she responded. “My leave is over and I realize I have nothing to show for it.”

Some people fear heights. Some are afraid of water. I have a strong aversion to the idea of having empty time and space and later not being able to account for it. It’s not that I don’t putter away time. I can happily spend the afternoon napping on the couch. I can linger over the Sunday newspaper and a cup of coffee without regret. I can while away an evening with friends and a bottle of wine. I can sit in the backyard and lose myself watching a hummingbird flit from flower to flower. No doubt about it, I can fritter away time with the best of them. What I can’t stomach is not knowing afterwards what I did with my hours. Non-productive time is one thing; time unaccounted for is quite another.

The creativity guru Julia Cameron teaches something she calls Ta-dah! lists. As opposed to To-Do lists, which reminds us of the tasks of the day, this is a list that takes note of what one has actually done in a given period of time. Past tense versus future. Instead of Prune the roses, vacuum, file taxes, it might say Read “Moby Dick”, baked cookies, listened to Mahler’s 4th Symphony, weeded the tomatoes, scrubbed the toilet…Ta-dah! lists are a way of acknowledging how we have spent our time, an especially good antidote to those days (weeks!) when we wonder where the hours have gone and what we might have to show for them. As Cameron says, “Facts are the opposite of drama…Often our days are far busier and more productive than we realize.” We fill our time, no doubt about it, the question is whether or not we know how we fill it.

We often think about our lives and the ordinariness of our days in generalities, but the truth is we live in specifics, in details, if only we are paying attention. Ta-dah! lists remind us of this. We didn’t just “hang out” or “do nothing” all weekend. We made scrambled eggs and looked at Facebook or took a walk and talked to our sister. We did a load of laundry and listened to NPR or we practiced the piano for an hour and then baked a cake.  

I am reminded of a passage in The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton:

“Artistic accounts involve abbreviations of what reality will force upon us,” de Botton writes. “A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X…But we never simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside…At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘He journeyed through the afternoon’.”

Time is always on my mind, and lately even more so. The month of March is a sort of staggered holiday in Albuquerque, the various private and public schools and university all taking spring breaks at different times. The weather has been equally unpredictable, 65 degrees and sunny one day, windy and cold the next, snow and sleet yet another day. Menopausal, one friend called this wildly changing weather. I hardly know if I am coming or going.

I thought I had spring break plans, a casual to-do list: I would finish up the spring cleanup work in the garden; haul a truck load of yard waste to the city composting center; put in many hours practice for my upcoming April performances; meet friends for coffee or drinks, breakfast or lunch; go to some extra yoga classes; take a long walk down by the river. Although there would be a lot of beautiful empty space in my week, I had some direction, a loose blueprint to structure my days.

Quite simply, it didn’t roll out like that. My dad was in the hospital for most of the week with an infection that took a nasty turn, and days of winter weather prevented any time outside. The week after spring break, just when I thought I had some handle on my time again, I was flattened by a bad tooth/sinus infection combo, which left me blurry and headachy, nauseous and dizzy for days. My practices took a hit in all kinds of ways. I cut back on my laps in the pool; I had to trade deep work at the piano for just some triage maintenance; I abandoned plans of yoga classes and long conversations over coffee. I fell behind in basic ways: dishes piled up in the sink, the cats knocked over several plants and I just walked past the mess for days on end, phone messages stacked up and emails went unreturned. You know, the minutiae of life.

I am reminded of a teaching moment. Years ago, a student came in with a practice chart littered with X’s and asterisks, some kind of code only she could understand. When I questioned Kathryn about it, she shrugged, “If there is an *, I totally did it. If there is an X, I did some.”

It is all too easy to just dismiss the last few weeks, and write it off wailing, “My spring break is over and I have nothing to show for it.” And trust me, I have been tempted to do just that. Turns out, I understand Sally’s distress all too well. But that isn’t a fair or accurate picture of my world. Or as Cameron would nudge me, facts, not drama. If I were to sit down and write a Ta-dah! list, I would find that I did way more than some. I spent tons of time with my parents, shuttling Momma back and forth to the hospital, sitting with Dad and talking basketball playoffs and books. There were meals concocted, beds made, floors swept. I wrote a few paragraphs, took a few notes. I practiced some, I read some. I swam some laps. I did some yoga every morning before coffee. I did some. And then some more.

Whatever our relationship might be with time, to-do lists or Ta-dah! lists, life is rarely all or nothing. Most days we live inside the messy “some.” It’s a good reminder that I function better in a world grounded in facts, not spun out in some dramatized version of my imagination. Right now, there are twenty-one brilliant red flowers on my amaryllis. There are seven daffodils in the courtyard. My orchid has three new leaves. I swam 37 minutes this morning and put in three hours on the piano yesterday. Wednesday afternoon I had a root canal. Friday morning I had breakfast with a dear friend.

It’s something.