“I hate wasting time!”
A familiar sentiment, no? One I reprise regularly, often grumpily. “What a waste of time!” after a movie that failed to amuse or a listening session with a bore.
But what if that bore has something I want – in my yesteryear, investible capital. A bore still, but not such a waste of time, eh?
Time wasted is time not devoted to a project we’ve embraced. Various of these projects are universally acknowledged – to eat, sleep, groom, bid your spouse happy anniversary. (Acknowledged, this last, but more than occasionally neglected, which entails apologies, an extra-special dinner, etc.) Other projects may be tribally mandated (Thanksgiving or, spare me, Superbowl Sunday). Some folks decry sleep as a waste of time, but that’s just boasting, because reluctance to allow sleep its due means you’re much in demand.
Then there are those projects, dear to oneself, one opts not to declare. Shopping at Saks. Brunching at this out-of-the-way greasy spoon (you’re kidding, right?). Porn, stats suggest, inveigles multitudes, though apparently none of my acquaintance.
My private project may be as insistent as any, but its defense leaves me flummoxed. Doing what I’m doing now I’m not wasting time – so say I! Ask me what good I’m doing, gushing more syllables into an over-worded and mostly inconsiderate world, and I stutter, blush, as if nabbed red-handed. I’m… well, I’m greeting friends, beguiling their moment, maybe sparking thought. True enough – but is any of these plausive explanations my real reason? If my friends weren’t reading, wouldn’t I be writing anyway?
My private project, it turns out, is so harebrained and improbable I couldn’t confess it even to my shrink, if I didn’t think shrinks were a waste of time. Observe me accepting my prize from the King of Norway – not really, just kidding – or enchanting a nineteen-year-old in a lonely college library a hundred years hence as Thoreau did me with his voice. Can’t happen, won’t happen, doesn’t happen, Carll, sober up! I know better, but isn’t just the dream a thrill-ride superior to a super-duper rollercoaster’s even if it ends where it began?
Truth is, we don’t know why we do what we do, feel what we feel, love where we love, though we deny this because the consequence of such a conclusion is impotence, we’re not responsible, some other power is, as invisible as it is potent, teasing our strings like a marionette’s. We may call this power God – or Will – or Desire – it sports many aliases – but all are X’s for this force we cannot define or reliably control which drives us willy-nilly who knows why. We resent and revel in our force’s dominion, as we might in a father’s if we had a good one. It’s humiliating, our subservience, and glorious, ousting doubts.
No other creature, best we know, gripes about wasting time. Whatever they’re doing is what they’re supposed to: instinct and intellect are one, never at odds. We may envy their clarity, while shuddering at the tedium. Tolstoy said he wanted to be a tree, but did he really? Better firewood than War and Peace?
One person’s urgency may be another’s injury. This happens to writers all the time. I’d rather write than do most things, socialize, say. It’s not that I don’t want to yap with pals – I do – sometimes – if I cherish my pals or feel emptied out. I’m a party animal once I get started. But don’t get me started, please, at least until I’ve syphoned the silence!
That time might be wasted evokes the mystery of humanity. I ache not to waste yours.