An Ode to Quality Time
By Emily Waddell
Image by Mary Louise Sprague
I think I speak for many of us when I say I refer to time in the binary of pre-pandemic and “????”. In this New Testament of days, life is so very tiring. In an effort to compensate for experiences unhad, concerts unheard, and friends unvisited, one’s schedule is abhorrent. It seems in the rush to participate in life again. I underestimated the administrative exhaustion of doing all of it. Class times, commutes, in-person meetings have stormed my calendar like a digital bastille. I have things like “scheduling conflicts” to manage again. I think about ways to let people down gently via an email subject line (the answer is with the white heart emoji, I guess).
Do not mistake this as a rant on minutiae, but instead an ode to quality time. I have hope; just as we got used to being a nation locked down, we will thrive again. The approximation Hillsborough Street traffic will become as natural as the circadian rhythm that wakes us each morning. Thus, as we attempt to resume a life of the gathering, let us take forth some of the only glittering pieces of growth the past two years have graciously endowed us with.
Block off time to create and consider.
Emerging from temporal emptiness, it has become clear there are two kinds of time: time for thinking and time for doing. If there’s anything I’ve learned from therapy (aka Emma Chamberlain’s podcast), it’s that being creative takes time. It takes time, without doing any one specific thing, to contemplate and understand what you’re passionate about and how you want to move through the world. I believe that giving yourself dedicated time to do nothing can pay off in spades throughout the rest of your endeavors. You will be more clear headed and able to be intentional about the way you choose to spend your time.
Be Nice to Yourself.
I know we all just stared out of our childhood bedrooms for a couple years like that scene in Twilight: New Moon. It’s understandable to want to get after it. But the logistics of life are real and do take energy. Be gracious with yourself and others as you attempt to strike this balance between a life well lived and a life overwhelmed. Perhaps resilience now looks different than it did at the start of February 2019.
Unlike its start, the pandemic never received an official close. We go through every day ready to brace for new information about the world around us. The state of standby, ready to change life plans at the turn of a news report is draining. The best we can do is live intentionally within the current landscape of conditions around us. That in and of itself is reason enough to keep affording yourself patience.
And Finally, Time Isn’t Even Real Anyways.
It took a pandemic igniting and blowing up my calendar to realize there isn’t linear progress to career, social life, relationships, and self. Things meander and go back and forth and up and down and back and forth again.
It is the thing attempted that matters, not the time it takes to get there or the pace at which you do it. Careful, this is contrary to American culture. The way to practice this is to appreciate the moment for what it is and not compare it to the moment’s past or future. Observe the state of earthly conditions you exist in, contemplate them, thrive in them, then take the earthly state that you are currently in and do something more than just survive in it. As cellist Yo-Yo Ma said in the NPR Tiny Desk Concert I teared up at last night, “some days it’s easier than others. Like yesterday, but different. It’s not painful to learn something if you do it incrementally.”
