Time--with a dose of irony

Every once in a while, my head wants to challenge physics.  If there's a long line of cars turning left and holding up traffic, why can't the ever-moving molecules in my car move between the ever-moving molecules in that tree on the boulevard so that I can get home sooner?  I don't know why, the moving molecule thing never works. At least it doesn't when there's a cat lounging in the doorway I need to get through to grab my phone. It's over or around the cat, and if my hip slams into the doorway, no obliging molecules ever part their ways like the Red Sea.

But the physics of time!  I know it's variable and yet it's not.  The sleepless hours between midnight and 2:30 a.m. stretch almost to eternity.  Yet a good hour's writing can seem so short, a good hour's thinking even shorter because so few words make it to the page.  Mostly, though, the clock ticks inexorably on, and as I approach 74, there's less and less of it.  Or less and less of the energy to use the time meaningfully. 

I know all the rules about time.  We can't evade its limits by multi-tasking.  Regardless of how our phones summon us like Pied Pipers, we can't really watch TV and doom scroll.  Something gets lost.  We do both things badly.  In Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman--which I haven't had time to read but which has made the podcasts I listen to while I'm on my exercise bike--Burkeman tells us that we need to realize that, in the 4000 weeks given to us, we won't get everything on our to-do lists done. We have to make choices. (I've got maybe 500 weeks left, if I'm lucky.) Multi-taking will only make it worse, will actually steal that time from us because, at the end of it, the time will have fallen through our hands like sand.  I hope this rule doesn't apply to petting the cat on my lap while I write.

I also know that task switching--changing from deliberate time spent doing research, for example, to spending time rearranging the books on my shelves--is counter productive.  And at the end of a morning of evading writing by switching to reorganizing the novels and checking Facebook, I will be more exhausted than if I did those things sequentially.  Yet in the weeks when it was cloudy and cloudy and cloudy, I found that spending an entire morning writing was going to be just depressing.  So I planned to spend an hour writing and then an hour reading for the next chapter of The Frosted Bough:  Essays on Minimalism, which is about the minimalist painter Agnes Martin.  Then, to round my research on the chapter I'm just finishing, on "Making and Making Do," I'd learn about craftivism or read about Sheridan College's commitment to repair cafes.  It was really helpful  I'm guessing I didn't run out of a particular kind of concentration.  And maybe planning blocks of time made me innocent of task-switching.

I know that there are two things I can do to maybe eke out a few weeks after the 500 I'm hoping for.  One is to exercise--including cardio and strength training.  But I haven't found the formula.  If I lose 1 1/2 hours from my writing this week to exercise, how many more days does that give me at the end of my life?  And will I still be writing at 85?  Is there a best-before-date for poets?  I'm pretty sure that longer forms like novels or collections of essays might be a stretch.  I mostly exercise in the late afternoon when I'm too tired to read or write, and still don't manage to get in the recommended 140 minutes per week.  This is partly because the other thing that contributes to longevity is good relationships.  So is there a formula that helps me figure out whether losing a workout because I'm having coffee with a friend is a good use of my time?   I could spend a lot of my life just trying to extend my life.

I also understand what I call the time of craftsmanship.  Making a quilt or throwing a mug take as long as it takes to do it well.  You're not worrying about how long it's taking because you are lost in the pleasure of doing it well.  For me, this requires some discipline.  (When am I going to finish this bloody book!)  Yet lately I've taken on some quilting projects that need to be hand pieced, and I find that time so serene.

I have a handful of mantras that I find helpful.  Just be curious.  Kindness lives here.  It's just a problem to be solved--this last one is especially helpful when "it" is something that is making people in my life emotional or panicked.  The last is "Be here now."  Or "Be.  Here.  Now." So often we're not where we are physically, and we miss so much of life's magic like a smile from a stranger or the woodpecker high in the tree.  That's what Lyra tells me when he climbs on my lap while I write.  He reminds me that I'm not typing away in some mythical future when I finish the book and edit it and approve a cover and get the box of books in the mail and do my first reading.  That's all hypothetical anyway, as the Buddhists tell us.  Uncertainty is everywhere.  Given the last four years, we should know that.  The only antidote to uncertainty is the certainty and pleasure of being here now.