Curious how I spend my gift of time I prepared a little spreadsheet:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedsleep (night and nap) 9breakfast 0.5lunch (and lecture) 1dinner (and movie) 2missive 3news and email 1cooking/ food shopping 1exercise 1
TOTAL 18.5
hours in day 24
“free time” 5.5
Obligatory expenditures, strange to say, are my easiest. I know where I am, what I mean to be doing, I’ve no choice. Omit any of these exertions and complications would ensue: I’d go silent, hungry, weary, sick, fat(ter) or Jane would be sad. It’s the free time that haunts, where my soul gets into trouble. Out of an infinitude I’d like to be doing, how to choose? If I read, which book: if I write, what about? If I brood, my thoughts darken – concerning the direction of our species (dire) or the value of my contribution (nugatory). Free time begins to feel like solitary confinement. Why aren’t my friends calling, maybe everybody hates me, et cetera ad tedium. Jane’s nearby but I don’t want to burden her with me in this condition. Love takes care of its Beloved, not to distress with our distress.
Action is no anodyne. Busy for the sake of being busy is for me a bleaker hell. My futility keeps me company, cackling like Mephistopheles. Knowing I am avoiding my vocation, that I haven’t the strength, swamps me with self-disgust. Am I not man enough to be myself! Fruitless frivolity I abhor; liquor I eschew till dinner; happy pills forever, if I can. Travel or time with dear friends I account blessings (time with friends is its own sort of travel). At wit’s end, I play online backgammon with strangers named Slobodan or Jabari: enthralled by the suspense of flickering checkers and mischievous dice, my unallocated hours sluice, and, naturally, I reproach myself after, but by then it’s time for bed.
In my career years, working ten-hour days at least six days a week, I was too busy for gloom. I was also less alive. Living is neither complacently being nor robotically doing but fulfilling the purpose your soul’s assigned. It is seeing and feeling where you are and aren’t, tasting your instant’s sweetness or bitterness, giving your all to a dream that demands more. It hurts to live a life you might call a life – for what you’re doing is trying and untried. “Same old, same old” mummifies us against the assaults of time.
Consciousness is pain: the more, the more. And the most painful moments are the crossroads, the cruxes where we pause, the silence’s scrutiny crucifying our self-regard. Embarked on writing, I whoosh like a sailboat in full sail, each word by its sense or sound summoning its successor. I don’t think but surrender to my topic’s exigencies, following my words as Saint Francis his feet.
I have long envied saints whom God directs. Their mandate obviates doubt. My God is less prescriptive. He commands me to do my best, be my best, but provides no map. He says, “You know” – and He’s right – how could God be wrong? – I do know – sort of – but doubts assail. Every notion bristles with contradictions, every yes is kneecapped by a but. Yet I cannot dawdle at this crossroads dithering, I must decide. Onward!
More folks, I suspect, experience this dismay than disclose it. It’s humiliating not knowing why you are. I know from Shakespeare, Montaigne, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Beethoven, Caravaggio, many makers, my consternation is not unique. Life is not obvious faced head-on. Many avert their sight from the complexity. I love nothing more.