Making Time for the Other Things

What else gets lost in the day-to-day comparative economics of utility and aspiration?

Don’t let the leaves keep piling up.

It feels difficult to fathom that only a week ago, or rather exactly a week ago, I was driving home from work early because I had tested positive that morning twice for coronavirus. We'd had someone at work whose story I won't get into, but who clearly had contracted COVID from his son, who also works at the factory that I'm an employee of, and we work closely in an office together, sort of an office within an office. And he took five days off, as is the procedure, but came back and was still clearly sick and just sat in that office coughing for two weeks and finally I caught it from him. So last week I had some symptoms and decided to go get some tests and confirmed that that was the problem. So I came straight home.

And what an intense week it has been. I guess just to go over the COVID issues right away, really just for the first few days it was bad. It was: sleeping 16 hours a day, barely getting out of bed, being tired all the time, body aches, fever, that was pretty bad. But then within a few days, it really just turned into a cold, which I've been struggling with now for almost a week. Runny nose, cough, that kind of stuff. That's the worst of it, and frankly, it's really nice to have the time off of work. And so that's what I wanted to write about today, was this concept that I've been thinking a lot about, which is that we only take time to do these things for ourselves when we are forced to, right? If I hadn't gotten sick, I wouldn't have taken this time for myself.

And I realized how important it is, how within just this one week of being stuck in this little shed that I've turned into my office so that I don't have to be inside the house wearing a mask, I've been able to just take so many things off of my plate that had been adding up over the months and even years since we've gotten here. So why is that? Why do we tend to — or some of us, some subset of humanity tends to — prioritize themselves last in relation to other things. And for me, of course, it's family, which should always come first. I'm certainly not arguing against that. But also work, right? Economic independence, making sure that we've got enough income to put food on the table. I mean, of course that's super important as well, and I'm not saying it isn't, but why is it so hard for us to recognize that we could really use a little bit of time to focus on things that are uniquely personal?

So the things that I've been dealing with, aside from writing for the blog, which I guess is also sort of personal, but even more deeply personal, especially last night, was spending time going through some old hard drives and making sure that I'm not losing track of different files and videos and audio projects that I've had over the years. I'm a musician and I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles years ago as head of a band and putting productions together in terms of shows and putting a lineup together. I mean, having a band really at all, but certainly in Los Angeles, is difficult in terms of getting people to show up. And unless you're lucky enough to really have a band where all the members are super invested, what you end up doing very often is what I did, which is having a rotating cast of members, some more full-time than others. But on any given day, at any given gig, you might have a totally different drummer or totally different bass player, etc.

And over those years you accumulate all this raw footage, live stuff and live video. Sometimes, very often certain venues in Los Angeles and probably other places will do a sort of stage production with some lighting and maybe someone even controlling the cameras and then give that to you at the end of the project, at the end of the gig. So here's your set. Sometimes you have to pay for that and I always did because I thought that was really useful. You might pay $50 or $100 to get a relatively high quality video of your performance. So anyway, I was going through all of that old stuff last night and just found a lot of really, really great stuff, really, really good stuff and thankfully this old hard drive that I was looking at hadn't died. Hard drives die all the time and if you don't do this kind of work, if you don't go through and archive these things and in my case, I was pushing it up to the Google cloud so that at least in theory it won't get lost anymore. If you don't do that stuff, occasionally you will lose things and for me that's really valuable. I've got this sort of heart of an archivist and I just have to hang on to everything because the past is really important to me — but I'm sure everyone can relate to that at least a little bit.

So it just felt really important to me to be able to do that. But what I think is a lot more interesting is this idea of falling into habits and not really having a good system for understanding what it is that we are giving away, what are the trade offs that we are making. And specifically with regard to something like work which is so all encompassing, and so powerful, and so much of a blocker, right? It's so easy to say work is the most important thing no matter what. It's certainly when you're young, but even when you have a family, it's very easy to position it like if I'm not working, if I'm not bringing that bacon home, so to speak — we're vegetarian, but whatever — nothing else can happen, right? Everything will fall apart if I'm not doing this job, doing this thing. And over time, that can just out dominate all of these other factors. And in my case, of course, supporting my wife has to come second, if not first sometimes, because we're doing the homeschooling and she's taking care of most of that. On the weekends, I have to devote really everything to just finding a way to spend quality time with the kids and taking them off of her schedule, even just for a little bit at times; and activities that we all do together and whatever. That, of course, is super important. But there's this larger question of when do you find time to do these personal things that matter only to you?

And what I see, at least in my own pattern, in my own habits, is that you very quickly do this thing where, okay, well, work is first and then family is second. And then if there's any other time, then I'll do the rest of the stuff, the other things, right? But then that tends to fade into the distance... It never gets really closer. It just keeps getting further and further away. Why is that? I was thinking of what a good analogy would be, and it's sort of like, let's say you have this hole in your yard and there's leaves blowing around and you're trying to uncover this thing. You don't really know what it is yet. It's just there, but it's sort of covered. And every day more leaves get blown in. But somehow you're really only able to clear off a little bit at a time, right? It's just time consuming process to actually get at this thing. And if you're not clearing out more leaves than you're getting in every day, all the new ones, you're not making progress. You're making the opposite of progress. You're going in the wrong direction. And over time, that thing just disappears. If I hadn't found this time because of COVID to go back through some of these old hard drives, I might have lost that stuff. It might have just disappeared forever. And there would have been some day in the future, five or ten or even 20 years from now, where I was like, oh my God, what happened? All this stuff, I know I had it somewhere. Where is it?

Why is that so hard? Why can't we find a way to make that important also? And I think it has to do with these shifting priorities, right? It's really easy to have two top priorities and just call it a day. And family has to come first. I mean, I've already said that. But you have to make time for yourself too, and it's just not easy. So as much as I'm not enjoying being sick with COVID and being a little bit worried about what the future looks like, because I'm not over it yet, and a week has gone by and what if I am someone that ends up with long COVID; there's so many what ifs. But at least for now I am very grateful for having had this time. For taking the time to move into this little shack that I have in my backyard and leaving the door open and being able to look out at these beautiful leaves and the lake and being visited by hundreds of ladybugs and the occasional wasp and just really feeling a sort of calmness that I don't get at work.

Work is really the place where time goes to disappear. Those memories don't mean much and they all sort of fade together and it's like a sort of prison complex, right, where you're there with people that you work with and you get along and you make jokes and whatever, but nobody really wants to be there. I don't know. You can't make it what it isn't. And for me, the real tragedy is that I really don't hate that job. It's not bad work, it's interesting, it's technical, it's different. But what bothers me is having to go there, is being in the office for this specific reason, because I feel vulnerable to COVID. We bought this farm and moved across the country, in large part to sort of run away from the danger of catching COVID. And of course, I couldn't get away from it because one does have to earn a living as well. But if only that job would allow me to work from home, I wouldn't be in the position that I am now, where I'm actually looking for other jobs. I would just be hanging in there, doing my work and being very grateful.

But at this point, working from home is just non-negotiable. I have to be able to do that because I've discovered this little world in my backyard that I sort of miss. I love having this connection to nature and I love having my little six year old boy come running over to tell me that today, he and his sister have decided that they want me to go to work and ask for some glass from the Corning factory so that they can build a rocket, because he heard that we use our glass in space shuttles. And just those little moments, there's always something, right? I mean, every day these little minds are exploding and, God, I want to be there for that. I need to be there for that. And those are the things that you give away in the name of security, in the name of having a source of income. And it's just such a shame that we've sort of gotten to that place where most of the time you have to do one or the other.

When do we find time for the other things? All that other stuff in our life? It gets away from you, right? Without the luxury of something like this, where you get forced to slow down and take things off of your plate. You don't get there and those things disappear. It's not even like a luxury, it's a necessity. It's just further on down the chain. The analogy that I was thinking is this thing that's buried that you have to sort of constantly uncover because just like this, like writing this blog piece, I couldn't do it when I had all these other things on my mind, right? I couldn't do it when I had ten micro blog musical pieces for CHILLFILTR® that I had to write. And I couldn't do it when I still had paperwork to file for the paid time off. And I couldn't do it when I still have emails to write about these different job applications. I couldn't do it when all this other stuff was floating around that felt more important. All that had to be dealt with first so that I could then jump in here. But this is important too. And if I hadn't found a way to clear everything off, to allow for this to happen, then there would have to be some other way of prioritizing this kind of writing over other things if there's always going to be something in the way.

It's just such a difficult problem to solve. And I guess the point of this whole thing is that if you have that issue, if you are like me and just have 5, 10, 20 different dreams that are kind of moving around and vying for your attention, don't lose hope. Just try to take it one step at a time and try to make time for the other things. Try to just clear away those leaves a little bit faster. Because it's not a luxury, it's a necessity. People like us need to have time to push our personal projects along and so often it makes no sense to anyone else. And that's okay. Maybe someday it will, but it doesn't have to. My creative world lives and dies with me. I have this blog and outlets where I throw things over the fence, but at the end of the day, I don't do it for that. I do it because it's something that is important to me and personal to me. And if there was no one to listen and if there's no one to read these things, I would still do it because I care, because I'm trying to hold space for this very odd time that we are living through. And even if it doesn't matter now, it may matter at some point. That is the value of these 'other things' that so often get lost in the day-to-day comparative economics of utility and aspiration.