Time.
It's unique. I cannot think of anything so fundamental, yet
fleeting, as it is. Time can never be reconstructed. With infinite control and perfect knowledge,
everything else can be rebuilt. Your first car can be saved from decaying into rust.
Bring back every burned piece of paper. That perfect moonlit night of your
first kiss. But time? Once used, it's gone.
Why bring this up? Because I'm running out of it.
Sure, in some metaphysical sense, we are all running out of
time. Death waits for no man and all that mumbo jumbo. But that's not what I'm
getting at. Rather, I have goals and deadlines to meet, yet my worst enemy—procrastination—sneaks
up on me and takes hold.
Not fun.
That, I suppose, is why we budget our time, hording it like
Scrooge McDuck. But for me, it goes beyond that. I always seem to be running,
never quite at a standstill. My body may
be stuck in one place, but my mind never shuts down. Ever. I’m
always thinking about something or doing something, all because it needs to be
done.
I'm not saying that I'm the only one in this
predicament. In fact, I tend to think
that most of us are. And that's a shame. But it's also part of being an adult.
I look at my life and often wonder where my time went. Where’s the time to be myself and relax and be a
husband and be an individual? It disappears faster than we ever realize.
Now, I’m not complaining—not much, anyhow.
This is something we all have to deal
with. For right now, though, it has come
as a startling slap in the face. It all
stems from my work on my novels. First
and foremost, I am sending off my novel—The
Red Dress—to my editor in August (Thanks Susan!). But before I do that, I have a little more
work I want to get done on it. The usual
stuff—tweaking lines, deepening character development, description,
description, description—but even though it may be simple-ish, it
still takes time.
The second reason is simpler. On my new novel, I really thought I’d
be further along than I am. Oh, there
are reasons for that. Mainly, it’s
that I can reliably write about 500 words a day, but often lack the time and
energy to do more. It’s
hard to write when you are—literally—falling asleep at the keyboard.
Time surrounds our lives, dictates our activities, and
either provides opportunities or shuts them down. We find time for those things that are
important to us, which is why I spend time with my wife, I spend time writing,
and spend time working—so I can afford to spend time writing and
with my wife. Our obsession with it
really should be no surprise.
Perhaps that is why almost every science fiction show I’ve
ever watched deals with it in some way.
Strike that. Every show deals with
it, though it’s most obvious in sci-fi—with all their talk of time travel and
paradoxes and polarity reversals—to such an extent that it is expected and
almost always horribly done (If you don’t get that, watch a season of Star
Trek. The solution always seems to be
reversing the polarity. Sci-fi tropes
will be another post some day . . . when I find time to write it.).If you know
anything about time travel theory, a bad soap opera is often preferable.
But sci-fi isn’t the only genre with a heavy emphasis on
time, just the most obvious. Imagine, if
you will, a serial killer on a spree, and the cops and their writer friend have
to stop him before he kills again (Castle).
Or how about the looming wedding that one character is having second
thoughts about (How I Met Your Mother)?
Traveling to space for the first time and coming back to Earth to find
that your friends have moved on while you’re out playing astronaut (The Big Bang
Theory).
The entire plot of 24.
The list goes on. And
I can go on. Toss in movies, books, video games,
sports. Hell, just about everything in
our lives, entertainment or otherwise, centers itself around time. All of it to prove just one thing.
It’s a maxim we heard how many times growing
up? Thousands? Millions?
And we don’t stop hearing it. Always
do your best with what you have. Learn
as much as you can and always give your best effort with the time you
have. It almost makes you want to toss
it all away and do whatever you please.
But we know we can’t.
Ignoring bills won’t make them go away. All it does is get our gas shut off.
So we are going to keep minding it. Keep following every tick of the clock and
relishing those moments. To do otherwise
is to die. Literally. So, as much as I
hate to do it, I will buckle down and get back to work. That novel won’t write itself. And I can’t expect my editor to do all the work for
me. If that was the case, then she’d
be the author, and I’d be the bum on the street, people
watching.
Who am I kidding? I am that bum on the street people
watching. But I just call it research
for my next book.
