4. On time
Dear Readers,
I’ll be brief if I can, sure time is precious. I’m saying that like it’s news, but it kind of is news to me. In my first letter I told you that I’d spent two or three years jamming my waking hours with work and writing (which is also work) and how doing that left me spent. Now I’m (trying, at least, to be) more careful with my time.
Last week I caught a dose of that very fashionable plague that’s doing the rounds and it knocked me flat on my arse. I spent four foul-humoured days in bed, cycling between annoyance that I’d caught it, frustration at being stuck in bed, and boredom with the whole mess. I tried to read and managed some short stories. I tried to watch movies but some were too stupid. Or maybe I was too stupid. Between the headache and the fever I felt like my imagination was missing. And so I couldn’t write. I lay there and stared at the ceiling and grumbled and did nothing.
And that’s okay. The four days in bed feel like a blip. A teeny tiny bit of time hardly worth measuring. The last ten minutes I’ve spent writing this feel far, far longer in comparison. And I wasn’t doing nothing – I was resting.
There’s a lot of good writing out there about time and how we use it and you can read all about it if you like but what I’ve realised, or been reminded of (in my own time) is that time is (above all) personal. You might know that already. Having control of how I could use my time taken away was annoying, frustrating and boring, yes, but now I feel like taking even more care over the choices I make because that’s how I experience time – through my experiences – time itself not being something that exists. I don’t know if that makes sense.
I’ve failed to be brief of course, in this letter full of commas, brackets, and sentences beginning with ‘And’. And this is the end of it – it’s time to write something else.
Yours sincerely,
Paul