Making time work for you

The above is a recording of the below essay.

Chasing time

I had a tantrum last Friday morning.

I’d just returned home from getting my kids to school and before my baby was going to wake up, I wanted to do 30 minutes of something. But I was in the delirium new moms face when they’re met with a rare, sparkling moment of freedom and don’t quite know what to do with it:

open the boxes that are in the hallway?

clear the kitchen counter?

send off these emails?

proofread that story,

take a shower,

call the doctor,

cream my face?

The more the options reveal themselves, the more urgent they seem. And somehow their natural hierarchy dissolves. Brushing my teeth feels as focus-intensive as writing the sum of a book.

I was half getting dressed, half answering emails with a newsletter draft open in the next tab when Abie got home from his morning routine and saw me spinning in circles around myself. I’m not actually sure if what came next was a tantrum or meltdown but I want to say tantrum, because as I started to explain the upset to him, I could feel my body getting hot.

And he tried to hug me but, “Respectfully,” I said, “I need to hit a pillow, kick the bed, or scream at the top of my lungs.”

I produced a clumsy cocktail of all three while he witnessed in silence and calm.

Panting heavy after much force exerted, I accepted his walking closer to me. He stepped on my small feet with his much bigger ones and immediately then, I felt more at ease.

At home, in my bedroom and body.

“You’re chasing time,” is what he said. “I don’t know how it happens, but somehow, you have to make time work for you, not the other way around.”

I continued getting dressed, mind spinning slower, and didn’t think much of what he said. But as the day went on, I kept hearing those words: make time work for you, not the other way around.

Making time work for you

Time isn’t linear, I’m pretty sure. It’s a spiral, just like growth. We attach ourselves to timelines, tentpoles, goals with shelf lives, and create urgencies that tell us by x, we must have done y.

These great expectations set us up for even greater disappointment.

I think about that Joseph Heller/Kurt Vonnegut story often, the one where at a mutual friend’s party, Vonnegut asks Heller how he feels to know that their mutual friend, the host, makes more money in a day than Heller made in the history of sales from his book, Catch-22.

Heller responds by saying he has something the mutual friend will never have — enough.

To have enough is not the same as to settle but sometimes I get it mixed up. I think the difference is a matter of time. Like when you can recognize that you have enough, even if you don’t intend to settle, the timelines don’t rule you.

Having enough, wanting it all

Can you have enough and want more at the same time?

I want it all.

I used to feel embarrassed to say it but the truth is, I want it all.

I want more kids and

a vibrant social life,

deep connection to my people,

the earth,

and the realms above and around it.

A loving marriage and

a massively

wild and

varied career,

successful by the measure of who it can touch and what I can do as a result of it.

I want to change what worlds I leave behind to the girls I leave them for, and

I don’t want to settle on any of it.

I think the trick with holding your wants in measured grace, with both patience and the urgency of human will is to recognize that even in spite of the wants, if this, right now, were all there is, it would be enough.

The timeline is the illusion.

They call having it all a myth, but actually it’s the timeline that’s a myth.

It’s the difference between Veruca Salt’s wanting now and the lengthy process implied by all.

Time works for us. Not the other way around.

Gratitude

The thing about enoughness is that in order to feel it, you have to be willing to touch gratitude too. And gratitude is tricky. It can feel unsafe. It’s a wrestle when you’re in a hole, a ghost when you fear it will sweep you away.

I used to be scared to feel grateful. I thought somehow it would disconnect me from an understanding that there’s suffering too.

As if both things can’t be true.

In fact I learned it’s the opposite — that when you kill gratitude for your own life, everything else goes dark.

I realize now that gratitude and faith are so closely intertwined they might be the same thing. That to have both means to trust in the good of the force of your own will, of the wills of those around you — those you love, those you hate, those you pray for anyway — and of the force of the will of a world that is far greater than any of us.

In each of our lives there is reason to feel grateful. These reasons are sometimes elusive, confusing, even a little snarky. They vary in shape, size, color and meaning but they’re ours no matter their form. These nontransferable tokens of power to nurture and wield and to transform into tokens that can be shared.

Letting gratitude live with you is a choice to stay in relationship.

Guilt (is a map)

I think what has stopped me from letting it in, from accepting an appetite for a big life, is guilt. Like I didn’t think I deserve it. I felt bad to want it.

They say guilt is useless.

We’re told to push it away with the good intention of releasing it but pushing doesn’t make it go away. It just makes us feel worse for having it.

To release the guilt, I believe you must study it. You must understand what wants to be seen underneath it.

Guilt has shown me wants I’ve not consciously looked at, behaviors I don’t want to repeat. It has helped me find agency in choice and reconnected me to my integrity.

Sometimes I feel guilt for not being with my baby. It’s usually after I haven’t spent enough time with her. I don’t get mad at the guilt in these instances because they show me a chasm between what I want and where I am in the moment. The reverse happens too, for whatever it’s worth, too much time in the nest, not enough out foraging.

And in either instance, guilt is a map that helps me get home again.

To really believe you deserve something, to feel grateful for what you want and to keep wanting it without guilt, you have to know the desire doesn’t make you bad. That the desire isn’t bad. You’ll know if it is after you’ve returned home: do you still want what you wanted?

When the answer is yes, there’s a generous, slow-paced self-acceptance — a clarity of conscience that gives you the energy to pursue with careful intention.

You might mistake the fierceness of this intention for reckless abandon but I assure you, they are not the same thing.

Then comes the action.

In action is always where the most meaningful lessons are waiting for you to collect them. It’s where you learn that on the other side of wanting it all, believing you deserve it all, going after it all is an even greater desire for everyone else to go after the same thing.

To grab their lives by the horns, to fight for themselves and to get to themselves and to have themselves with grace. To fill themselves up with so much agency that it spills out to inspire the worlds around them. To understand we all go home together.

When I can’t feel this, I know I’m not yet at the bottom of what I really want.

That makes me want to keep going.

And this, I believe, is the work of a lifetime.

So there’s no rush to get there.