Making Time Count, Right From The Start
As 2023 unfolds, I’ve been reflecting on how I spent last year. And mostly wondering if I can mark time differently. Especially here at the beginning, before things get out of hand. I keep returning to an idea from a book by Craig Morgan Teicher entitled We Begin in Gladness. It’s about what prompts writers to begin anew. A poet and essayist, Teicher is somewhat of a renaissance man in the digital age. For instance, he led the vaunted Paris Review into a new era of online production. His book taught me that creatives generate new work, not through a gush of inspiration, but through a give-and-take of energies. It involves listening as well as speaking. The exchange fills both with gladness.
Happiness is singular. Gladness is reciprocal.
As we roll into the new year, I’m deliberately choosing a different way to begin. First, I’m adjusting my stance toward time. Less rushing, more patience. Achieving my ambition means working in chunks of progress enriched by conversations — both with the people I love, and the new people I hope to meet.
The COVID years were such a social wasteland. The shutdown intensified the culture of narcissism we’re living in now. The telling symptom being what psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg calls “the destruction of time.” Because digital heightens our self-absorption, it also destroys the meaningful use of time. One day, we look up from our screens and can’t imagine where all our time went. We need each other to make time count for something.
As 2022 wrapped up, I found myself working in isolation to complete a massive pile of rewrites that kept a project from finishing. Time was my enemy. Hardly any gladness in that. In a different situation last year, I traveled to Santa Fe for a writing fellowship that was downright lush with progress. Rising at dawn in the adobe casita I’d been granted, I’d light a fire and work until hunger or fatigue overtook me. On evening walks I met my neighbors. I found that being among a community of artists and talking about ideas was soul stirring. During that brief 8-day stint, time was my friend. And the storehouse of work generated from my days there, nourished me for many months to come.
If it’s true that time is what you make it, then I want to make 2023 count for something more. Not to slow it down. But to fill my days with the spirit of gladness. And if time is a human construct, then its value improves with human-to-human connection. That’s time well spent.
