I am up in Oregon, staying with an old friend of mine from high school. He's a high powered kind of guy in his professional life, but he's also a down home simple guy at heart. We used to travel together a lot in college and have been in each others' lives so long that we barely need to talk anymore. We have similar rhythms and outlooks, and it's always been very easy to fall into a groove. This vacation has been no different.
One of my friend's favorite phrases (always said with deep sarcasm) is "Do I look like I'm made out of time?!?!" And we always laugh because life is always too busy and there is always too much on the plate.
But this week up in Oregon, has actually made me really think about time in a whole new way. In this very peaceful atmosphere, in a house that is not my own, with a family member who is not (really) a family member... there really are very few responsibilities or things to do. And by very few I mean NONE.
There is nothing to do up here.
Like, really. Nothing.
There is no TV.
There are screens bigger than a laptop.
There is one night time restaurant in town (a pizza parlor). There is one morning restaurant in town (a cafe with killer muffins and wifi). There is one pharmacy, stocked with things that people who have nothing to do but kill time might want to buy (chiefly board games, jigsaw puzzles, and an array of pharmacy stuff). There is one gas station. There is a Circle K. I can walk from one end of town to the other, leisurely, in fifteen minutes. That's it.
It's really bare bones. And life gets very simple when there aren't a ton of options.
We keep the fire going.
We figure out what to eat for meals.
We read.
We check our email and keep in some kind of touch. But that's kind of more joyful because it's not squeezed in between a bunch of other distractions. It kind of feels good to do something productive, because that something productive has a margin of a lot of empty, relaxed space around it.
It's the difference between having an infinite stack of cash and being able to spend as much, or as little, of it, whenever you want.... and being completely overwhelmed by credit card debt and scrambling the pay the minimum all the time. With the whole pile of cash, the options are all about doing what you want to do with it, while with the credit card scenario the options are all about doing what you need to do with it.
And here's what's interesting. Besides just feeling a whole lot happier, I'm still being productive. The time stretches out to accommodate the various activities... and the more time I spend just doing things that are completely non-productive, the more time it feels like I have time to choose to do something that would otherwise be called work.
I know this is an unnatural scenario. This is not reality and probably will never be reality. But. It's interesting.
For example. When I got here I cleared my entire mental plate of all To Do's. I only needed to do things that were healthy and pleasing to me. At first I figured I'd just sleep all day. But, in actuality, I slept about 10 hours the first night, and 9 hours the second night, and felt good all day afterwards. So obviously, in reality, I do not need to sleep all the time.
I did want to keep my body moving. So I started walking to the cafe in the morning. ("Morning" is loosely described as that part of the day after waking up and before nightfall. But generally it happens before noon.) I have no agenda in getting there, other than desire for the killer muffins, so I usually take a pretty long route to get there and a longer one coming back. It's not about needing to get in x number of minutes or distance of exercise, it's because the body likes it and I like being out in the world.
When I get back, sometimes I take a shower. Showers feel good. I enjoy the whole process, even more so because it's not required (strictly).
Options feel better than requirements. Interesting.
Then what? Well, there was the jig saw puzzle day. I have to say that, in terms of intrinsically non-productive activities, I think putting together a puzzle is one of the best. Of course, it scratches a deeply satisfying OCD itch in me to create order out of chaos, but it's also just... wow... so much fun. For me at least. It's like extremely low stakes problem solving that is guaranteed to succeed over time. It's three dimensional. It's analog. It requires spatial skills (which I have in spades and find inordinate joy in exercising). It requires depth of visual detail: the further you get into the dharma of the picture, the more you can see between the atoms. You start analyzing things based on negative space, patterns, infinitely small nuances of color.
Doing a puzzle is just great. There are no screens. No electronics. And I hesitate to say it, but it kills a whole bunch of time. But "killing" is just not the right word. It's more (dare I say it?) meditative. It's engrossing. It's present moment. It's about the thing itself. Not a whole lot more, and not a whole lot less.
I have to say that the ten or twelve hours I spent on that puzzle were probably the most restorative time on this vacation so far. Between that and the walking, I've really started to forget the unpleasantness of last year.
So: what is a waste of time? Maybe the things that "waste" time are simply things that we do without thinking about. Maybe the simplest and least productive things, when done with attention, give us back far more than the high powered and complicated things do, when done in a hurry or to just tick them off the checklist.
We are all, of course, made out of time. We are more made out of time than anything else. And the time we are made of is finite (at least as far as we can tell in terms of living in our bodies). Looking at what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, makes time feel like it's going both slower and more deeply. Racing through or (god forbid) "multitasking" saps my energy, races the clock, leaves me breathless and unsatisfied.
I think it's interesting to play with the elasticity of time this way. Paying attention is one way. And approaching the tasks based on wants vs needs is another way. Maybe I want to do something non productive for awhile. My fear is that I will want to set up dominoes in a line and knock them over for ever, once I get started. So I tried that last night. Yup: fun. But... I didn't end up wanting to do that forever. Doing it a couple of times was fun and slightly engrossing. And I felt better for having done so. Not so deprived. Not so "I'm the person who never gets to line up dominoes and knock them down because I'm a grownup and grownups don't have time to do stuff like that." Nope. I let myself play with dominoes until I didn't want to anymore. And when I stopped playing with the dominoes it was because I didn't want or need to do that any more. I wanted, more, to look at email and think about touring options for the opera company.
Yes. It would be great if all of life could be this easy and simplified down. I think there's a lot to be said for touching base with this feeling periodically. I know that sitting in meditation for ten minutes a day is kind of like this. It's an acknowledgement that, behind all the hurry, there is peace. In between the wildly spinning atomic mass, there is space. It starts to all feel like a big list of musts and have tos and high priorities. But there is space in between those things. There must be. And paying attention to what I'm doing, and paying attention to what I want to be doing, has to be a key way to finding my way inside that space.
As Ferris Beuller says: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.
Now. There's a guy who really was made of time.
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