Once Upon a Time and Llamas

There was an era in my life when I had time for hobbies.  I didn’t really know it, because have I always felt like I was busy, but once upon a time I did have minutes to spare for something that wasn’t (per my current metric) necessary to sustain life.

As many of us emphasize– we are busy people.  There is a lot expected of each of us every day.  Every second has to count.  In my life, this translates to an existence that feels an awful lot like perpetual triage.  The largest contributor to the chaos earns the attention.  Usually this takes the form of a three-year old with multiple peas up her nose, a failed diaper, a small kitchen fire, or an eight year-old yelling something like, “watch this!” followed by a loud crashing noise.

When not (literally) putting out fires, we focus on things that, as mentioned above, can be categorized as life sustaining.  Prepping meals (a 45 minute process followed by a three-minute frenzy where it all disappears leaving 45 more minutes of dishes in its wake) rummaging through the ever-growing “Mount Clothes” (our affectionate name for the piled– but folded!– laundry) to find something weather appropriate for the kids, commuting to work, working, commuting home, sports practices, baths, stories, bottles, bedtime, eight trips to the bathroom, 7 glasses of water… you get the drift.  If I finish my life-sustaining activities by 9:30 PM it is an overwhelming success.  I get a full 7.5 hours to myself before the routine starts over again.  Hobbies, you say?  Remind me how I ever thought I was busy pre-adulthood.  But I did.

I had notions of being a writer pre-kids.  I had several ideas of the stories I wanted to write.  I completed dozens of first chapters, and half as many second chapters.  I completed no finished works.  What stopped me?  The elusive perfect… and excuses.  I had writer’s block.  I was tired.  My first chapter wasn’t how I wanted it to be.  I’d finish it later.  I wasn’t inspired.  I was chasing the perfect time, place and mood.  Ah, youth…

I’ve learned a couple of things about life since the once-upon-a-time days.  I’ll share two of them with you today.  The first is that there will never be a perfect.  Opportunities don’t just fall into laps– they are discovered.  And the only way to discover them are to be in the game to begin with.  Opportunities have to be made.   Books don’t write themselves.

The second is that, for me anyways, I work best when my hair is on fire.  When I know I only have 22 minutes to work on something, I can cut the bullshit and just take care of what I need to take care of.  If I only have 22 minutes to write, I don’t have time for writer’s block.  I don’t have time to check my email.  I don’t have time for perfection. I only have time to type.  I barely have time to backspace to take care of spelling errors.  And for some reason, my Scrivener doesn’t recognize the ” ‘ll” contraction, so I end up with 1,000 mis-corrected words that start with “ll” in my drafts.  Which, since I am writing in English, always means “llama”.  That’s a lot of llamas to correct later on.  But whatever.  Backspace is not life sustaining.  I’ll deal with that pack of llamas later.

Living the triaged life has made me appreciate the minutes that I do have and has made me be creative about how I find them.  When I do find blocks of time, I make the most of them.  I call these the “in-between” moments and my goal is to capture as many of them back as possible.  I have found that when I do manage to corral them, I recognize that I do actually have some time for non-life sustaining activities.

And writing has helped me to document them.  Those words didn’t appear out of thin air.  I wrote them during those in-between moments.  Some days, I might have only managed to write 200.  But over time, those in-between moments add up to full-fledged works.  Something tangible, something real.  I never would have found them or appreciated them if I wasn’t in the middle of a triaged life.

The balancing act isn’t easy and, as I’ve said before, it ain’t pretty.  It requires managing your own expectations, but still enthusiastically hunting down those in-between moments.  I sometimes long for the lazy days, but know that I would never be as productive with them as I am now.  I live a much more inspired life these days.  In the end,  I wouldn’t trade my triage and my llamas  for the once-upon-a-time days.  I kinda like living life with my hair on fire.  Every day is interesting.